Kohana is the PHP5 framework started as a fork of Codeigniter. When Codeigniter first appeared, it delighted the developers with its elegant user guide and simple and straightforward usage patterns. Codeigniter has only one limitation – that it doesn’t leverage the features of PHP5; creators of Codeigniter won’t regard this as a limitation because, it was meant to support both PHP4 and PHP5:)
Most of the clients who were forced to retain their old PHP4 server without upgrading to PHP5, but wanted to follow an organized structure for their projects welcomed Codeigniter.

Codeigniter is a framework with small footprint. The whole philosophy seems to be of keeping things simple, yet in an organized way. There are no heavy coding rules that developers need to adhere while coding.
If you ever imagined to kick start a project in MVC pattern (Model View Controller), keeping your business logic, database interactions and design artifacts separate, without worrying about the coding and conventions to be followed while using a framework; Codeigniter or Kohana seems to be the best choice. Learning curves of these frameworks are really short. The user-guide available for codeigniter is the most appealing advantage that influences the users to taste this framework. Once tasted the Codeigniter way of coding, developers used to have an unwillingness to think of a different framework, such is the luxury of easiness that Codeigniter pulls developers into.

Codeigniter framework feature additions, as well as new releases went slow, but Kohana community grew and started developing newer features and revisions faster. Although Kohana started as a fork of Codeigniter, the new version 2.0 was strictly a PHP5 framework. It was a complete rewrite from the ground up. Kohana uses the advantage of new Object model available in PHP5, helping the developers code in a better object oriented style. It is extremely DRY (Do not Repeat Yourself). There are no code generators and endless configuration files, so setting up is fast and easy.

Database helpers, Caching, ORM, pagination, authentication, hooks (where users can hook codes at particular points of execution), clean urls, profiling, validation, transparent extensions, custom error pages and more and more features are available for Kohana.

If you have to start a simple project in an organized manner and if the server has only PHP4 then Codeigniter seems to be the best choice. If you wanted to utilize the PHP5 specific features or if the project is some what bigger then Kohana is a best quick start choice.

---

About the Author :
Kiran has been working for Bobcares, as Sr. Software Engineer since April 2010. He is an expert in PHP based web development. He bags an experience of 3.8 years in the industry. His hobbies include blogging, listening to music and traveling. He is passionate about Zend framework, OO concepts and design, jQuery and much more..

---

Co-authored by Sankar.H