Zack Live » Framework

Say Hello to Kohana 3

Zack — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 04:37:46 +0000

Kohana 3 has been released for a while. This is a redesign version of Kohana. Kohana 3 and 2 will both be in active, if you are new to Kohana, I suggest you to start with Kohana 3. The most important difference between these two version is that Kohana 3 uses a new design pattern HMVC rather than MVC as Kohana 2 is using. What is HMVC? These two articles may help you understand it:

You can download Kohana 3 here:

Kohana 3 Download

As usual, it’s extremely easy to install Kohana, unzip the download file, put the Kohana folder to your web server, change permissions of following folders to 777:

application/cache
application/logs

Finally make some changes to application/bootstrap.php:

Change timezone
Set the base_url

That’s it, your Kohana is ready to go. Visit your website which should be the base_url you set above, you will see the Environment Tests page:

Notice the green background text, it’s telling you to delete the install.php file in you Kohana root. And then refresh the page, you will see “hello, world!” text. Where is the text come from? Open application->classes->controller, there is a welcome.php there. Double click the file, Here is the code:

request->response = 'hello, world!';
	}

} // End Welcome

This is the Welcome controller, the only thing it do is to print the text ‘hello, world!’ to the screen. You can try to output other text by change:

$this->request->response = 'hello, world!';

to:

$this->request->response = 'hello, Kohana 3! I am Zack from ZackLive.com~';

Now you’ve got your Kohana installed, try to get your hands dirty.

Some useful resource for Kohana 3:

If you’ve got any questions about Kohana 3, feel free to ask me by commenting here or post on Kohana forum.

Four WordPress Theme Frameworks

Zack — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 16:35:15 +0000

I found four WordPress theme frameworks which worth to try out.

Hybrid
Hybrid is a WordPress theme framework designed with content in mind. There is no other theme that will display your content in a meaningful way like this one does. It’s all about getting your information out there to the world. Without all the fuss. That’s what Hybrid does.
Thematic
This is more than just a WordPress theme: Thematic is a highly extensible, search-engine optimized WordPress Theme Framework featuring 13 widget-ready areas, grid-based layout samples, styling for popular plugins and more. The coding, functionality and support rivals the best in “premium” themes. With one, important, difference—Thematic is completely free and open source.
WP Framework
WP Framework is a “blank” WordPress theme that empowers you to create awesome WordPress Themes in little to no time!
Sandbox
The Sandbox is a powerful tool available for WordPress theme designers and developers. The Sandbox can be easily designed just with CSS, so beginners will feel comfortable not bothering with PHP.

Experienced developers and designers can accomplish almost anything with minimal work, thanks to the rich, semantic markup and profusion of classes dynamically generated by the Sandbox.

Hello World Tutorial for Kohana

Zack — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 04:44:47 +0000

It seems unnecessary to write a Hello World tuorial for a PHP framework, because when someone comes to framework, he is no longer a beginner, can figure out his own Hello World. But this idea comes up in my brain, and I guess it might be helpful for someone who is the first time to work with MVC or OOP. It’s quite simple, let’s get started.

You should have installed Kohana correctly, now we create a hello.php in /application/controllers/, here is the content of the file:

/**
* Hello World controller
*/
class Hello_Controller extends Template_Controller
{
function __construct()
{
parent::__construct();
}

function index()
{
$this->template->title = “Hello World”;
$this->template->content = “Hello, welcome to Kohana World !!!”;
}
}
?>

We have a Hello Controller with a index method, so we can call this page in the URL: localhost/kohana/index.php/hello. If you cannot understand this, you may want to see ‘Show me, don’t tell me‘ section in Kohana 101. In the Hello Controller, we set the title and content of our Hello World page, of course you can change the title and content into anything.

Now we have a Controller, we also need a View to reveal the page. Create a template.php in /applicaion/views/, and type in the fellowing codes:

<?php echo $title ?>

Very simple HTML codes, echo the title and content set in the Hello Controller to the page, that’s all what it does. You can see how Kohana works, processing in Controller, sending the result to View, and the View exhibit the page.

Usually I’d like to add a profiler to a example page, so that we can see some system information. It’s very easy to do that, just add one line to the Construt function in the Controller:

$this->profiler = new Profiler;

So the Hello Controller file should look like this:

/**
* Hello World controller
*/
class Hello_Controller extends Template_Controller
{
function __construct()
{
parent::__construct();
$this->profiler = new Profiler;
}

function index()
{
$this->template->title = “Hello World”;
$this->template->content = “Hello, welcome to Kohana World !!!”;
}
}
?>

We can now visit localhost/kohana/index.php/hello, you will have a page the same as the image above.

You already have some basic concepts of Kohana now, I highly recommand you to read Kohana 101, or if you are even not sure how to setup your own Kohana, you can read my post, Install Kohana on Windows. Hope this can help you.