Kohana is Code Igniter on Steroids

Still, it is lightweight and clean. Kohana is a Code Igniter fork that is completely open source and community driven. If you are used to Code Igniter, then Kohana would be a walk in the park. The one major difference is that Kohana is exclusively for PHP 5 while Code Igniter supports from PHP 4 and up. Kohana is strinctly OOP with benefits like visibility protection, automatic class loading, overloading, interfaces, abstracts, and singletons. Cool!

Whats more is that while Code Igniter supports only $POST arrays and no GET, Kohana lets POST and GET arrays live together in harmony with the same tight security of Code Igniter.

Another trivial thing thats always kind of bugged me of Code Igniter is the directory structure. Kohana’s directory structure makes a lot more sense. See, Code Igniter has one directory at the root called System. In this directory is a bunch of subdirectories of which your application directory is a part of. Kohana went and put the application directory with the system directory on the root path. I know, I know, it really is pedantic of me, but it just makes so much more sense to do something so insignificant. Well, actually, on second thought, its not as trivial as it might seem. Come upgrade time, you only need to upgrade the system folder and your application folder would be untouched. Code Igniter stores a bunch of system related files in their app folder which could get overwritten when upgrading, but need to be upgrade every once in a while as they do make changes to those files occasionally.

Another thing is that changes and fixes happens a lot faster in Kohana as it is a community project. Code Igniter is brilliant, but it was kind of slowish in releasing fixes and improvements as Ellis Labs first do Expression Engine (it seems) then Code Igniter. Kohana living in a community allows for rapid expansion and fixes.

All in all, I think Kohana is a great fork on an already great framework. Keep up the good work. If you are worried about it only working on PHP 5, well, PHP 4’s end of life was the 31st of December 2007 already! Convert! At least bugs will be fixed till 2008-08-08. Cool date they chose!

One Comment to "Kohana is Code Igniter on Steroids"

• Allan said: On 05/01/2008 at 3:24 pm

  you know you can just drag the application directory out of the system folder and into the root and it’ll continue working just fine!

Spit it out!

Filed in: Code Igniter, Open Source, PHP, Programming, web development by: Stii