Smarter Sheep

Kohana is a fast lightweight framework for developing php applications. I have been working through some of the information and tutorials on their site. Kohana is a branch off the CodeIgnitor php framework. I looked at Codeignitor first but wound up looking deeper into Kohana primarily because Kohana is based on PHP 5 and Codeignitor was based off of PHP 4. Codeignitor had a pretty good reputation but because it was created and supported by a company with an existing product to support it went for long breaks between updates etc. Apparently a large group of the community got unhappy and created their own branch off the source for PHP5 and then ended up doing a major rewrite all together. i may be getting some of my details wrong, but this is what I can tell from things I have read googling. In any case. I really like them both. They are both light and fast. They certianly don’t do all the work for you, but the frameworks I have used in the past tended to be so bloated and heavy that I spend just as much time trying to work around them as I would have just leaving them out to begin with.

I have been toying with CodeIgnitor for the last couple of days and have to say that I like it so far. There is another fork of it that I will look at next. I am also spending some time with Scripalicious for ajax functionality to see what combination for php development will give us the best bang for the buck in terms of performance and resources needed to crank out applications in a hurry.

Kohana is a fork of the Code Ignitor framework that lifechurch.tv is using from what I understand.

I am also looking at several content management systems that look like good candidates for future development.

Drupal

Expression Engine

So far the following frameworks look interesting:

CakePHP
Zend
Code Igniter

More to come