Kohana or not Kohana

[phpclub]

As few of you know I develop daily on Kohana. Was 2011 when I started working in the version 3.1.X of this framework at TuManitas as recommendation of JesusDiez after we evaluated few other frameworks back that time.

Things we liked of KO

Small footprint (much faster than others)
Fast to learn
Modules, (ORM, Image, Auth…)
HMVC
Good community
Active Development
Jesus already had experience with KO.
Soon after they released 3.2.X and we migrated to that branch without much pain.

At beginning 2012 I’ve decided to migrate Open Classifieds to Kohana since seemed a good step forward (and it was ;)). So I took last stable branch from 3.2.X. Took me many months to develop all the features while I was working and keeping OC 1.X alive. In June 2012 they launched 3.3.0 using PSR-0. I was too deep in development to move to 3.3.x (mistake). So officially OC uses KO 3.2.3 (in next release).

In all this time we were seeing bugs (even reported and fixed but took 7 months to get merged) the forum down for weeks and lost months of answers in the forums. Also development was inactive, so since few month ago started to wonder…this is dead…

Few days ago they announced the final release of KO. So KO seems K.O. DEAD. they gave power to some users but none is interested in KO anymore or that seems. Even worst they released 3.2.3 that was actually 3.3.2. Forum was down again and a new forum emerged http://discourse.kohanaframework.org/ full of not really nice comments and not really transparent answers. See here or here.

To resume it: KO core developers do not believe in MVC anymore. They do not use KO anymore therefore do not develop on it and it’s really difficult to contribute.

Going to the point.

At Open Classifieds we are facing a new challenge. What the hell we do with Kohana?

I’ve decided to use Kohana so I could forget about maintaining an entire custom FW by myself with a community in my back, where we will get nice updates, patches etc.. right now nothing of that seems viable.

Solutions

1. Keep the branch 3.2.x

I will fork KO 3.2.3 (latest) and keep it updated. It’s the cheapest solution for us. Don’t forget everything is working really good. I say fork because there’s no more support for that branch (and seems the most popular)

2. Move to branch 3.3.x

If any branch is going to keep alive is this one, they use PSR-0 that will be a nightmare to automatically update via PHP (remember OC normally is installed in shared environments).

Theres a PHP script to migrate 3.2 to 3.3 here does almost everything.

Also and craziest part seems that 3.2.x has improvements and bugs that are not merged into 3.3.x branch. That’s a big problem.

Won’t be too expensive to migrate, but will require some time to make a really smooth updater that doesn’t crash anyone’s site (DANGER! 15K live sites).

This will also allow me to contribute to 3.3.x on kohana directly (now I am part of the github organization).

3. Change framework

Right now I will not choose KO to develop and I will go to more decoupled dependencies, so I won’t be suffering the same again….also other frameworks seem lot more active, like laravel, symfony2 etc..

To be honest I am discarding this solution since will be a massive refactor, almost impossible to update clients and crazy expensive for FOSS project :'(

Your opinion? really matters!

Original: https://garridodiaz.com/kohana-kohana/