Kohana

Kohana
As some of you may know, I live on the southern hemisphere, therefore, classes ended for me in late November. That means that I have a lot of time in my hands. When I’m not out partying, drinking alcohol, smoking weed or having wild sex with incredibly hot girls, I get bored.
I started thinking about what I had done the past summer to entertain myself, but then I remembered that my life was a lot different than it is now and that I still played MapleStory.
It did not take too long for me to decide to take up programming again. Of course, it would be PHP and -probably, in the near future- other languages.
It is not uncommon to, when starting a new project, ponder on where to start. In this context, the question that emerged was “what framework should I use?”
A framework is like a workbench (though there are better analogies out there). There are many and of different sizes, features, quality, and colours. If the workbench is of poor quality, it’ll take a really skilled user to create a decent end product. The major workbenches (or at least, that I know of) are “Symfony” (eRepublik and phpbb4 built on it), “CakePHP” and “CodeIgniter”. I didn’t really like any of them.
I had forgotten about the issue until I learnt about Kohana on reddit, which was cited it as a good example of quality code. I quickly downloaded it and started reading it.
I wanted to build something on it. I decided to do something along the lines of reverse-engineering VuTales, but without the reverse-engineering part.
I haven’t had any issues up to now (although I’m on the second day of using it). The only problem I found was the documentation, which is sometimes derpy and outdated.
Building stuff on it has been a pleasure. It’s fast, efficient, displays errors nicely, intuitive and other adjectives.
Two things about kohana I like: it doesn’t use a template language and it really understands and implements the MVC pattern. Also, cascading filesystem.
This “project” of mine has its own github page: https://github.com/Roj/kohana-mootales
If you ask: yes, I plan on finishing this.
I’m not a good designer, so if someone has tips on improving the front-end, please tell me.
Some things I am going to change, of course. For example, I will give more “weight” to fragments. In VuTales , they’re located on the almost-bottom of the page, meaning you have to scroll. Also, that’s the only space they get, aside from another one on each user’s profile. You can’t hotlink them.
Additionally, in the future, I’ll merge the ‘latest blog comments’ and ‘latest forum comments’, and possibly ‘latest blogs’ and ‘latest pictures’ (since they are considered blogs – consisting solely in an image). My version only has the feature to like and unlike, but not to dislike something (question: would you call it undislike or unlike?), but I’ll probably add it in the future. I have read Bryan’s arguments to implement the dislike ability and I agree with them for the most part, but I will let you change anytime you want. Also, you since the system keeps count of the amount of blogs you’ve written, I’ve decided it should count the fragments, too.

You probably wanted an image:
The list of things to do can be found in the readme, but here it is anyway:

[+] = done
[-] = halfway-done
[ ] = todo
—
SQL
[+] user table
[+] blogs table
[+] votes table
[+] blog_comments table
[+] fragments table
[ ] messages table
[ ] forum_threads table
[ ] forum_comments table
[ ] friends table
etc
OTHER
[+] register
[+] login
[+] logout
[+] create a blog
[+] like/unlike a blog
[+] add a comment to a blog
[+] create fragments
[+] view blog (including comments etc)
[+] bbcode
[-] frontpage (add comments, etc)
[-] dashboard (need to add threads, notifications, etc)
[-] user profiles (- need to do the stats thing, threads, user info, ping, avatar etc)
[-] update user stats all the time
[ ] manage blogs (mark as draft, rename, edit, delete)
[ ] delete fragments
[ ] textarea buttons (bbcode, emoticons, etc)
[ ] forum
[ ] picture blogs
[ ] mail
[ ] friendship
[ ] admin cp
[ ] block user
[ ] help page
[ ] contact/report bug page