Kohana’s User Guide
- Posted by dlib on June 20th, 2008 filed in From the web, Kohana
DavidZ has been so kind to make the user guide into a PDF. Thank you David. I’d also like to thank everyone for suggesting new tutorials, I’ll take it all into consideration although I can’t guarantee anything.
Anyway, speaking of the user guide I thought of something last night. There’s been quite some (valid) criticisms on the user guide. Some find it unclear and some stuff is just not documented. Since it’s a wiki and everyone can join in on making it better, we can all do our share. I propose that you all comment and make a top 5 list of pages that need the most work. If there are enough comments I can put together a more definite list where we can all put our focus on.
So, write a comment with the five most needy user guide pages so we can work on them together.
June 20th, 2008 at 5:51 pm
It’s hard to pinpoint one specific area, but I think a separate “Getting Started” section would be very useful. Maybe the “Installation” section can be folded within. Here are some suggestions for the structure:
Getting Started:
* Installing and configuring Kohana
* What is Model-View-Controller?
* Structuring your Kohana application
* Working with Kohana URL’s
* Connecting to your database
* Using forms
* Basic validation
* Basic authentication
* Your first Kohana application (from kohana101.pdf)
* Securely deploying your application
A lot of this information exists in various forms either on this website or in other locations, but would be very useful to combine into one place.
Adding documentation on the new validation library would also be useful. Maybe a 2.2 branch of the docs.
June 20th, 2008 at 11:58 pm
Hello again..
Thank dlib for credits. I’ll try to keep like that :P.
And, well, I think it’s true: Kohana needs (in my simple opinion) a better Tutorial module, or something like that… I know, Kohana comes from CodeIgniter but these two frameworks are not the same, so we can´t spect that a new user install and configure Kohana, and undertands it reading CI User’s guide…
What do you think about GOOD video tutorials (something different to a BLOG please!!!), or little articles about specific topics (to start) like sessions, validation, forms and these commonly used stuffs…
Of course, I’ll try to post some of these helps… I don’t know… in YouTube?… Here?… my SkyDrive site?…
But first, I’ll try to adapt to Kohana with the docs that we have now.
PD 1: Sorry if I was too strong… I’ll help too.
PD 2: Sorry for my english..
June 22nd, 2008 at 10:31 am
DavidZ: if you want to post tutorials here, you’re welcome. Register so I can give you the priviliges.
June 22nd, 2008 at 10:30 pm
Using Modules and how to Create your own.
I’m currently learning Kohana, and attempting to write a blog Module.
I originally was using my own custom framework, but it was becoming to much of a hassle to keep up with myself. And so far I really like the code base.
June 22nd, 2008 at 11:08 pm
I’m still waiting for complete user guide (with descriptions and examples for ALL classes and their methods).
June 23rd, 2008 at 7:32 am
Documentating is a tedious and not very appealing job. We all want a complete user guide but work has to be done for it. It’s a wiki so everyone can step in, instead of waiting you can do it yourself.
My intention of this blog post is that we could find out the biggest weaknesses in the user guide so we can fix them together. What exactly is lacking? Just saying it’s bad won’t help us making it better.
Neovive’s structure, for example, points to a specific flaw that might be worked at.
June 23rd, 2008 at 10:59 am
I agree with Zoxive. I’d really appreciate a tutorial of how to make a module with best practices.
June 23rd, 2008 at 2:59 pm
Regarding modules, if you are trying to build something at the moment, review the current user guide pages: http://docs.kohanaphp.com/general/filesystem and http://docs.kohanaphp.com/general/modules then check the existing modules in the source code for some excellent examples (Auth, GMaps, etc.)
June 23rd, 2008 at 10:49 pm
Hi,
I put together I quick post on using the Pagination library if anyone is interested, I was going to hand it accross to dlib to post up but see there is actually a Pagination post coming soon so this can serve as an intro before that one arrives!
Pagination tut
/Matt
June 24th, 2008 at 4:06 pm
I consider myself a better writer than coder (I started out in the early 90’s doing desktop publishing), so I’m more than willing to help with the documentation part of putting together a User Guide.
).
However I’m still getting up to speed on Kohana (which is taking me forever because I don’t have a lot of time to dedicate to it, plus I’m slightly code-retarded
So, if somebody wants to work with me to explain stuff, I will happily turn those explanations into polished, professional-looking documentation. Dlib has my email via the registration for this blog….
June 24th, 2008 at 4:18 pm
Also, it occurs to me that a super-useful shortcut to good documentation would be a page or set of pages that just have categorized links to all the existing documentation and tutorials and code examples that already exist.
Dlib’s categories above are very close to that, but perhaps, if dlib agrees, those of us who are interested could work to flesh out those categories some more and make them really complete and comprehensive.
This would have to be a ‘crowd source’ project, as ideally we’d want stuff in there from the forum, the old forum, etc. as well. The problem IMHO with the forum as a resource is that it’s not exactly easy to find what you’re looking for by way of explanations, or examples, or especially sample code.
Alternatively, we could set up a parallel wiki (i.e. a different wiki than the ‘official’ documentation) for this sort of thing; I’ve got a domain or two that could be turned to that purpose if hosting space is an issue, but with this set of folks, somehow I doubt that it will be!
July 21st, 2008 at 3:29 pm
Please put DOC version of this tutorial.