Kohana

Kohana is an elegant HMVC PHP5 framework that provides a rich set of components for building web applications.

It requires very little configuration, fully supports UTF-8 and i18n, and provides many of the tools that a developer needs within a highly flexible system. The integrated class auto-loading, cascading filesystem, highly consistent API, and easy integration with vendor libraries make it viable for any project, large or small.

Why Use Kohana?

You need to build applications quickly.

 Many common components are included: translation tools, database access, code profiling, encryption, validation, and more.

You need to use specific libraries and tools.

 Extending existing components and adding new libraries is very easy.

You need to write commercial applications.

 Uses the BSD license, so you can use and modify it for commercial purposes.

You want a very fast framework.

 Benchmarking a framework is hard and rarely reflects the real world, but Kohana is very efficient and carefully optimized for real world usage.

You want good debugging and profiling tools.

 Simple and effective tools help identify and solve performance issues quickly.

You want to know what the framework is doing.

 Very well commented code and a simple routing structure makes it easy to understand what is happening.

You like working with objects and classes, rather than files and functions.

 This is an OOP framework that is extremely DRY. Everything is built using strict PHP 5.2 classes and objects.

You prefer to write your own code, rather than having it generated for you.

 There are no code generators and endless configuration files, so setting up is fast and easy.

You need community support.

 A very active community forum and IRC channel means that most questions are answered very quickly.