As you might know, I am developing some internal software for LifeStyleTV at the moment. Because of various slightly annoying circumstances I am stuck using PHP and MySQL for this. Not the worst of course, but I must say I really do prefer C# over PHP for oh so many reasons. But anyways, that wasn’t the point of this post. The point is that for my life to become hopefully quite a bit easier and hopefully a lot more organized I decided to go looking for a framework I can use as a base for the software I will be developing.

After much looking I finally stumbled over a framework called Kohana.

Kohana is an open source, object oriented H MVC web framework built using PHP5 by a team of volunteers that aims to be swift, secure, and small.

Kohana is licensed under a BSD license, so you can legally use it for any kind of open source, commercial, or personal project.

Getting started with it was a bit of a hassle because the documentation isn’t the greatest, but the small community has been helpful and the framework is pretty clear once you grasp the basics. For me it was particularly difficult since I don’t really have that much experience with MVC frameworks at all. But so far it has been very fun to learn and code with it.

There are currently two versions of Kohana, 2 and 3. These are pretty much different frameworks, and I decided to go for version 3 as it seem to be cleaner and support HMVC which seems very interesting.

Here are some very helpful resources that helped me get started:

• The Unofficial Kohana 3.0 Wiki
• Kohana userguide
• The Kohana irc channel

Alrighty, will blog more about Kohana some other day. Maybe even some tutorials…?

Are you using any PHP frameworks? What do you use? Please share!