Kohana 3 (most often referred to as KO3) is an elegant PHP framework developed from scratch. It differs from other PHP frameworks in the sense that it aims to be lean and mean, and follows best coding practices. Every new version of Kohana 3 aims to get closer to standards, and remains as clean and swift as possible.

While Kohana 3 maintains its own online documentation, which is the best source for looking up any particular information regarding Kohana, the purpose of this site is to provide a headstart for creating web applications in KO3. The online documentation also includes an API viewer, that provides detailed explanation of Kohana 3 core and modules.

This documentation assumes you have decent experience with coding practices, MVC, PHP and Web servers. Git knowledge is not necessary, but it allows for a faster development cycle using GitHub’s Kohana repositories.

To learn more about coding practices, head over to sourcemaking.

To learn about MVC, read here.

To begin coding a web application with KO3, let’s install Kohana 3 now.