Comment by jordanlev | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jordanlev | Hacker News Reader

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I am a big fan of the Kohana framework, but was very disappointed at the direction they took with version 3.0 of that framework. For the kinds of applications I build in PHP, Kohana 2.3.4 was pretty much the perfect framework for my tastes. Kohana 3 changed everything around, lacked documentation, and made things much more verbose for relatively little benefit (to me and my kinds of projects -- I'm sure it benefits others in some way).

This Fuel framework looks like they took Kohana 2.3.4, cleaned up some bugs, added the command line utility and migrations to it, and that's it. Awesome!

Really only one thing that seems to be missing (and maybe it's in there but not in the documentation): how do you put validation in the model, so you're not duplicating model validation in every action that processes submitted form data?

Other than that, I would also agree with what others have said about the tone of the developers -- it's not going to help the growth of the project's community in the long run.

Kohana 3 changed everything around, lacked documentation, and made things much more verbose for relatively little benefit.

This is the major thing that turned me off about Kohana. I loved the original concept - "PHP5 fork of CodeIgniter" - and we actually have it backing our two largest web apps. But I would never recommend Kohana again for a commercial project that is under active development.

Between minor versions there was major API breakage, that wasn't really documented - and was going on in parallel with 3.0 development (think Rails 2 -> 3 with no documentation). For a long time the "Unofficial Kohana 3 Wiki" was actually the only source of documentation for KO3 (even after release).

It seems like the PHP community keeps fragmenting into new PHP frameworks to replace old stodgy (cough PHP4) frameworks (good), with modern design practices (good), but then totally ignoring the community aspect of OS software, documentation, and maintenance.

I actually like Ko3 a lot better than 2.x. It just seems to jive with how I think and arrange things. The docs are constantly getting better too.

Yeah, I definitely realize that I'm in the minority with my Ko2 love. It just seems to jive with how I think and arrange things. So I would never say that "Ko3 is terrible" (it's still better than most of the other php frameworks IMO), just that I personally was disappointed because I thought 2.3.4 was perfect for me and my projects and my tastes.

And I will admit that the Ko3 docs are now much better than they were a year ago (well, that unofficial wiki is -- the official docs are still severely lacking).

Yeah, Ko2.x was pretty nice as well. You could always fork it an maintain it with all the other misfits;) (I kid I kid (about being a misfit))

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