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Add to SafariWhen comparing CodeIgniter vs Kohana, the Slant community recommends CodeIgniter for most people. In the question“What are the best PHP frameworks?” CodeIgniter is ranked 9th while Kohana is ranked 20th. The most important reason people chose CodeIgniter is:
Setting up CodeIgniter is quick and easy. You can download the version you want from the CI homepage or directly pull the latest version from GitHub. After that, you unzip the contents to the directory that's required. The final step is to edit the `config.php` to suit your needs and it's set up and ready for development. There are also a lot of guides and tutorials from developers who have been using CI for a long time. This is because of the relative old age of the framework and the large community behind it.
Specs
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro Beginner-friendly
Setting up CodeIgniter is quick and easy. You can download the version you want from the CI homepage or directly pull the latest version from GitHub. After that, you unzip the contents to the directory that's required. The final step is to edit the config.php to suit your needs and it's set up and ready for development.
There are also a lot of guides and tutorials from developers who have been using CI for a long time. This is because of the relative old age of the framework and the large community behind it.
Pro Lightweight
CodeIgniter has a small footprint, just 3MB and that's including the user guide.
Pro Well documented
The documentation is clear, structured and thorough. It explains both commonly used and CodeIgniter specific concepts and always with clear examples.
Pro Active community
Because it's relatively old and well-liked, it has an active community of developers behind it. It's used by a lot of websites in production.
Pro Open source
The MIT License (MIT)
CodeIgniter is open source and is distributed under the MIT license.
Pro Stable
CodeIgniter is tested by hundreds of thousand of developers that use it in production. This means that it's very hard for any bugs or problems to go unnoticed. Even when a new version is out, bugs are quickly found and patched up.
Pro Easy to use templating engine
CodeIgniter has it's own templating engine built-in. It's based on a mustache-like templating language which is easy to learn for new developers who have never seen it. While experienced developers will feel very comfortable using it.
Pro Output caching
CodeIgniter lets you cache the web pages in order to decrease loading times and increase efficiency and performance.
Pro CodeIgniter v4 is a complete rewrite
CI4 will be out soon & is a rewrite..
"CodeIgniter 4 is a rewrite of the framework and is not backwards compatible."
So it will support ALOT more newer functionality built-in.
Pro Lightweight
With no PECL extensions or PEAR libraries to increase it's bloat, Kohana is extremely lightweight and massive libraries are avoided for more consistency and speed.
Pro OOP framework that is extremely DRY
Kohana follows the OOP software paradigm and it strictly enforces the DRY principle, which makes it easier for developers to write clean and maintainable code.
Pro Tools for quick development
Includes tools that help developers to make applications quickly and efficiently. Some of these tools include:
- Translation libraries
- Code profiling
- Form validation
etc...
Pro Open source
Kohana is open source and is released under the BSD license, this means that it can be modified even for commercial purposes.
Pro Low RAM usage
It is as fast as any popular framework, but the RAM usage is really low in comparison.
Cons
Con Outdated
CodeIgniter was first released during the times of PHP 4. This means that a lot of features that were added later to PHP are not available. Some of these features are:
- Support for namespaces
- Modular separation by default
- Procedural function helpers
While nowadays CodeIgniter can be used along the latest version of PHP, these features were not added so as not to mess with backward compatibility. They can still be used with CI, but it requires extending core files to make it work which is a waste of time and energy and requires advanced knowloedge of both PHP and CI.
Con No unit testing
Con It does not have basic functions
Some of the missing features include controller security, filters in forms and modoles, rules of validation, among others.
Con Poorly documented
Kohana has always been criticized for the poor documentation it has. Some things are not explained with details and some other things are not explained at all.
Con Deprecated PHP Framework
