In the last few days I have been teaching myself a new PHP Framework, Kohana.

Kohana is based on CodeIgniter, which I know, so I hoped it would be a shallow learning curve - I was right.

Several features attracted me to Kohana:

• UTF8 compliance
• Based on CodeIgniter
• Strict Object Oriented style

I had originally intended to learn Zend Framework, as I am going to be using this heavily at work. I did spend several days getting my head around ZF, only to decide that it really wasn't suited to small projects, and decided to give Kohana a go.

My only real stumbling block was the way the Form Validation worked. Although very similar to CI, the custom error messages for form validation rules took me a while to figure out. This was mainly because of the remnants of an old validation library still left in the stable distribution which I was using as an (incorrect) example.

Still, apart from an hour or so reading up on the validation, the process has been smooth and mostly pain free. I can see some definite improvements over Code Igniter, so all in all very happy with it.