For my 2cts, I tried Kohana for 2 months, but I was never happy with it.
Why I say this ?
I believe that the code in Kohana is really superior as CI is and more modern (PHP5, modular inside, great libs around it, ...) But that is not enough to make a good framework.
First of all, I see that the community around it is small, very small I can say and in case of problem we don’t have a strong support as we have with the CI’s forums. We can say it’s because Kohana is young, but I believe that is will stay all the time like that and grow only a few comparing to CI. The main reason is that they code, they code and they code, but never they are thinking about their community and build nice tutorials, forum culture, news on the website, ... I have felt that it’s like they are closed to newbies and that really discourage me.
I was chocked too about some developments decisions that they have made and that make absolutely un-compatible the applications between a 2.0 release and a 2.1 release ! (and next like they decided to remove the load object when $this->load won’t work in the next release…) They are acting really like they are living day to days without a real road map of what they are doing, and really that is not possible for me while I need a tool that help me, not a tool that I must adapt my libs and coding style at each release of the framework.
I must say that I am using a framework professionally, and the only thing that I am interesting in, is that my job is done, and done quickly. CI allows me this and I am very happy with it. When Kohana born I was interested because “something was moving around CI”. So I tried Kohana. But I see after 2 months that my job was not done with it, because they have a very poor documentation, tutorials that almost don’t work, and if we need something, we must post to forums and wait or connect to IRC. With CI I open the user guide, and 99% of my answers are there, then my job is done, and then my goal is reached.
I conclude that Kohana could be a great thing, but they really have to change their mentality and be a little bit more open to newbies and community to success, otherwise they will have a framework that will be good only for the people that like to dive into their code to understand it…
No offence about that I said, that’s just my opinion and I tried to explain why I tried Kohana and come back to the nice stability and awesome community that CI offers to me.
