kohana

Kohana is a PHP web application framework used for building web applications and APIs. It is designed to be lightweight, fast, and modular, with an emphasis on a clean object-oriented core. The project began as a fork of the CodeIgniter framework and matured into its own framework with a stable, extensible architecture.

Kohana provides an MVC pattern-based structure and a cascaded file system that allows modules, plugins, and core code to be extended without modification of core files. It includes an autoloader, explicit routing, built-in ORM for database interactions, and support for caching, database access, sessions, validation, and security features. The framework favors a minimal core with many features delivered as packages, and it supports HMVC through its modular approach.

Kohana is released under the BSD license and historically targeted PHP 5.x environments, focusing on performance and simplicity. In the 2010s, development on the core framework slowed, with community forks and parallel projects maintaining compatibility; as of the late 2010s and beyond, Kohana is not as actively developed as newer PHP frameworks, and users often migrate to alternatives such as Laravel or Symfony.

In addition to its software use, kohana is also a Japanese word meaning "little flower" (often written 小花) and is used as a given name or place name in Japan.