In December 2008, a new PHP framework called Yii has been released to the public with a stable 1.0. There were a lot of new PHP framework released in 2008, but Yii was one of the more recognised ones because:

• The author, Qiang Xue, is the author of the well established PRADO framework.
• It is a simple to use, well organised, PHP 5 only MVC framework.
• It claims to have astonishing performance.

Before I start this round of comparison, let me briefly list my experience with these frameworks, so you may interpret this article with your own judgement.

CodeIgniter: I started using CodeIgniter since its version 1.2.x from a few years ago. During the past few years I have worked on projects mainly using version 1.5.x and 1.6.x. I have now stopped using CodeIgniter in favour of using other PHP 5 only frameworks.

Kohana: I first started using Kohana when it was called BlueFlame back when it was first forked out of CodeIgniter. Since then I have lurked and participated in the Kohana community. All of my recent projects are done in Kohana.

Yii: The 1.0 release of Yii had my attention, but I didn’t really dive into it until about now. However, most of my impressions on Yii are based on its documentation and this article by Daniel.

Let’s see how they compare with each other.

Same notes as before: Grading scale: Limited < Fair < Good < Excellent. If a feature is not available in the distributed package, but is available via 3rd party libraries, I will state that in the comparison. If a feature is available both in the distributed package and via 3rd party libraries, only the official one will get assessed.

Software releases used for this comparison are:

CodeIgniter 1.7.1
Kohana 2.3.1
Yii 1.0.3

Licensing

CodeIgniter Good

CI uses a modified, generally regarded as more restrict, BSD/Apache-style license.

Kohana Excellent

Kohana uses a new BSD license.

Yii Excellent

Yii uses a new BSD license.

PHP Compatibility

CodeIgniter

PHP >= 4.3.2 (including all versions of PHP 5)

At first glance, it seems that CI has the edge because it supports both PHP 4 and PHP 5. However, if you are familiar with OOP then you would know that a lot of compromises had to be made in order to offer PHP 4 support. This is one of the primary reasons some developers including myself avoid to use CodeIgniter.

Even if you decided to use CodeIgniter, I still strongly recommend you build your application using PHP 5 and proper OOP techniques.

Kohana

PHP >= 5.2.3

Yii

PHP >= 5.1.0

Supported Databases

CodeIgniter Excellent

• MySQL
• MySQLi
• PostgreSQL
• MSSQL
• Oracle
• SQLite
• ODBC

Kohana Good

• MySQL
• MySQLi
• PostgreSQL
• MSSQL
• PDOSqlite

*Note: Kohana devs have decided long ago NOT to use PDO. Kohana 3.0 is planned to offer support for PDO.

Yii Excellent

All the DBMS supported by PDO (PHP Data Object).

* Note: Support for Active Record is limited by DBMS. Currently, only the following DBMS are supported:

• MySQL 4.1 or later
• PostgreSQL 7.3 or later
• SQLite 2 and 3

Community

CodeIgniter Excellent

CodeIgniter is blessed with a strong, active community that is friendly and helpful. CodeIgniter offers a forum, a bug tracker and a wiki.

Kohana Good

Kohana has a small but elite community. It offers a forum, Trac and IRC.

Yii Good

Yii is the youngest of the three, therefore has the smallest community, it is however growing rapidly as the framework itself gains more attention. Yii offers a forum, a project hosted at Google Code and a documentation section that supports user comments.

Documentation / User Guide

CodeIgniter Excellent

CodeIgniter is known for its excellent documentation. Its user guide is comprehensive, easy to follow and up-to-date. Every release of the framework contains a copy of the user guide too, in case you are maintaining more than one version of CodeIgniter applications.

Kohana Good

Kohana’s documentation has been improved since my last article. It now has coverage for most aspect of the framework. However, some parts of the documentation are out of date and sometimes incorrect.

I’ve been using Kohana for a long time now and I found the documentation sufficient and very helpful. It may not have the fine layout found in CodeIgniter’s user guide, but it certainly helps me track down features and usages.

Yii Fair

The documentation of Yii seems to be fairly well constructed even though I haven’t started using Yii. All new features or changed features are carefully documented so you know what is going on with the specific version of Yii you use. The API documentation is also very useful thanks to the fully documented code base. However, many features at this stage are not documented in the guide, you need to go through the API or the code base itself.

Tutorial / Sample Availability

CodeIgniter Good

CodeIgniter has a dedicated wiki page for all the tutorials, and you can dig around their forums to find more.

Kohana Good

Kohana has a dedicated page for tutorials, but is out-of-date. It also hosts a learning centre which unfortunately has not been updated since September 2008. You can still head over to their forums to find useful tutorials though.

Yii Good

Yii has a cookbook section that contains a selection of tutorials. As always, check their forums to find more.

MVC

All three frameworks use the MVC (Model-View-Controller) architecture.

CodeIgniter Yes

Apart from the standard MVC architecture, CodeIgniter also offers libraries, plugins, helpers and hooks.

Kohana Yes

Apart from the standard MVC architecture, Kohana also offers modules, events, libraries, helpers and hooks.

Yii Yes

Apart from the standard MVC architecture, Yii also offers components, modules, extensions, view widgets and helpers *.

* Helpers are undocumented but are referenced in the guide and in the API. All of the helpers can be found in the utils folder under the main framework directory.

Modularity

CodeIgniter via 3rd party libraries

CodeIgniter does not support modules out-of-box, but you may use 3rd party libraries such as HMVC or Matchbox to achieve similar effect.

Kohana Excellent

Kohana not only offers modules, but also has cascading file system which takes modularity to a higher level.

Yii Good

Yii 1.0.3 has added support for modules.

Conventions

Unlike CakePHP, all three frameworks offer flexible conventions. There are some defaults but most of them can be overwritten or configured.

Configuration

CodeIgniter Good

CodeIgniter has a fairly good configuration system.

Kohana Excellent

Kohana has an exceptionally well configuration system.

Quoted from the guide: The file structure of config files follows Kohana’s file structure. Meaning that configuration files in the application directory take precedence over those in modules which take precedence over those in the system directory. The one exception is config.php which is hardcoded into the application/config directory and cannot be moved elsewhere.

Yii Good

Yii has a fairly good configuration system.

Database Abstraction and ORM

Definitions: Database Abstraction, ORM

CodeIgniter Good

CodeIgniter has a very powerful database class. It offers query builders as well as database manipulation classes, however it has no built-in ORM support.

One important thing that needs clarification is that even though CodeIgniter has Active Record, it is NOT the same Active Record pattern people commonly refer to. CodeIgniter’s Active Record is merely a collection of query builders.

For ORM, please check out IgnitedRecord and DataMapper. Interestingly enough, despite their naming, IgnitedRecord uses the Data Mapper pattern and DataMapper uses the Active Record pattern.

Kohana Good

The most notable time saver during my project development has to be the ORM. Kohana offers a lightweight but useful ORM implementation. It’s not as sophisticated as the Rails Active Record module, but it does the job quite well. I especially love the ease of updating many-to-many records.

Yii Good

Yii has a more complex syntax for declaring model relationships than Kohana. However, it also offers more powerful features such as named scope, albeit the syntax is nowhere near as clean as Ruby on Rails’.

Auth and ACL

CodeIgniter via 3rd party libraries

CodeIgniter has a couple of 3rd party Auth and ACL libraries, please head over to their forums to find more.

Kohana Good

Kohana has a built-in Auth module and a number of 3rd party Auth and ACL libraries including my Authlite.

* A more complete Auth + ACL solution is being cooked for the 2.4 release. Check out Samsoir’s replies in this thread.

Yii Excellent

Yii has built-in support for both authentication and authorisation. As I have no first hand experience with Yii yet, I can only judge this feature from the documentation, by the look of it it’s fairly easy to use and flexible enough for most systems.

Validation

CodeIgniter Excellent

CodeIgniter’s form validation library.

Kohana Excellent

Kohana’s validation library.

Yii Excellent

Yii’s validation usage. All of the system validators can be found in the validators directory under the main framework directory.

Caching

CodeIgniter Limited

CodeIgniter only supports basic file system based page caching.

Kohana Good

Kohana offers a slightly more useful cache library that supports file, SQLite, APC, eAccelerator, memcache, and XCache based caching, with tag support.

Yii Good

Similar to Kohana’s implementation, Yii supports memcache, APC, XCache and DB based (default to SQLite) page and segment caching.

Session

CodeIgniter Good

CodeIgniter’s session class is fairly good, it supports database storing as well as handling flash data.

Kohana Good

Similarly to CodeIgniter, Kohana also offers a very good session library.

Yii Excellent

Yii provides a much more powerful and flexible session class. Unfortunately session at this stage is undocumented in the guide. Flash data is not part of the session classes but part of the Auth package.

Logging / Debugging

CodeIgniter Good

CodeIgniter has a basic error handling class and a profiler class.

Kohana Excellent

Kohana has a good logging class as well as a more flexible profiler.

Yii Excellent

Yii has a logging/profiling class that is just as powerful and flexible as Kohana’s.

Templating

All three frameworks encourage the use of native PHP for templating.

CodeIgniter alternative syntax available

CodeIgniter also provides an alternative template parser class.

Kohana alternative syntax available via 3rd party libraries

Kohana has no built-in alternative template syntax support. However, you can find some 3rd party ones such as Temper.

Yii alternative syntax available

Yii also provides an alternative template syntax borrowed from Prado.

Helpers

Helpers are usually libraries that used for simple, repetitive tasks.

CodeIgniter Excellent

CodeIgniter offers 21 built-in helpers.

Kohana Excellent

Kohana offers 19 built-in helpers.

Yii Limited

Yii offers 6 built-in helpers.

Bundled JavaScript Library

Bundling JavaScript does NOT mean you have to use the bundled JavaScript. In fact, I encourage the use of unobtrusive JavaScript than using the bundled classes.

CodeIgniter None

CodeIgniter has no bundled JavaScript library.

Kohana None

Kohana has no bundled JavaScript library.

Yii jQuery

Yii has jQuery bundled, and it provides a number of useful classes such as auto-complete.

Web Services

I recommend integrating Zend Framework for web service uses.

CodeIgniter Limited

CodeIgniter has an XML-RPC class.

Kohana None

Kohana has no built-in support for any web services.

Yii Limited

Yii has SOAP support.

Internationalisation

CodeIgniter Limited

CodeIgniter provides a basic language class.

Kohana Fair

Kohana provides basic locale and language support.

Yii Good

Yii provides a more complete i18n class.

Unit Testing

I recommend using SimpleTest or PHPUnit for your unit test needs.

CodeIgniter Limited

CodeIgniter has a very basic unit testing class.

Kohana None

Kohana has no built-in unit testing support in the distributed release version (v2.3.1). However, a unit test module can be found in SVN trunk.

Yii None

Yii has no built-in unit testing support.

The Verdict

Verdict from round 1: There is no right or wrong in which framework you use, everyone has his own taste. For me, CodeIgniter’s excellent documentation and Kohana’s strict PHP5 + easy to use are the primary reasons to choose them over say, CakePHP and Symfony. That said, CakePHP, Symfony and other frameworks are all excellent choices depending on your taste and experience. On one hand I envy the Ruby community because they obviously have the de facto framework to work with, on another hand, we have more options hey? :)

At this stage I can’t comment on Yii, but I am very tempted to developing at least one project using it. So far I am reasonably impressed by the features it offers. :)

Do you have anything to say about the frameworks? Found mistakes in the article? Start the discussion in the comments! :)

Update log

[2009-03-03]

- Added Kohana Auth/ACL and DB PDO references.

[2009-03-02]

- Kohana unit test module and template parser reference.
- Wording and other minor tweaks.
- Initial post.

Related posts

• Notes on Choosing a PHP Framework: A Quick Comparison of CodeIgniter and Kohana (50)
• Using Zend Framework with CodeIgniter (43)
• Yii Kohana Bridge updated: full Kohana flavour now added! (2)
• Using Zend Framework with Kohana (9)
• Using Zend Framework 1.8+ with Kohana (3)

$this->load->model('your_model', '', true);

The 2nd parameter, which in this case was left blank, is used if you want to assign a different object name to the model – something that I have never used.

Has anyone ever actually used a different object name? The reason I ask is because it’s so easy to forget about the 2nd parameter, and sometimes I try to put the true parameter to auto-load the database in the 2nd slot like this:

$this->load->model('my_model', true); // WRONG!

Of course, the easiest solution is to autoload the database through the config, but that can be a little inefficient for apps that don’t use the DB on every page.

Related posts

• Ruby on Rails, Passenger (ModRails) vs CodeIgniter and Kohana (15)
• Choosing a PHP Framework Round 2: Yii vs Kohana vs CodeIgniter (50)
• Another CodeIgniter book coming soon-ish (3)
• Using Zend Framework with CodeIgniter (43)
• Release: [Kohana Module] Authlite, for User Authentication (22)

Disclaimer 2:I apologise for posting such a useless benchmark (I certainly didn’t expect it to hit the DZone front page), but I think most of you missed the point. I merely posted this as a result of surprise (to me anyway). At a later stage I will conduct a much more meaningful comparison between some of the frameworks. Until then, please ignore this post. :)

Last few days I have been playing with Ruby and Rails, again.

Today, when someone was asking on a forum about the efficiency of web frameworks, I thought I’d give the few frameworks I work with some more benchmark testing.

So I went ahead and benchmarked CodeIgniter, Kohana and Rails, using a simple ‘Hello World!’ page. Now before I post any benchmark results, you should know that I have previously done a benchmark test on CodeIgniter, Kohana and CakePHP. CodeIgniter and Kohana shared similar results.

This time though, the benchmark results surprised me. Here they are, in a nutshell:

CodeIgniter: 451.53 [#/sec]
Kohana: 373.05 [#/sec]

Rails: 521.39 [#/sec]
CodeIgniter: 127.23 [#/sec]

Results are presented in requests per seconds, so the higher the better. Now, please let me explain why I have included CodeIgniter twice.

The first two benchmarks were done on MAMP which has Apache 2.0.59 and PHP 5.2.5 with Zend Optimizer and XCache enabled.

The last two benchmarks were done on OS X Leopard’s default Apache 2.2.8 and PHP 5.2.5 without Zend Optimizer or XCache. Hence the worse result for CodeIgniter.

For the Rails implementation, the benchmark was done on Passenger (aka ModRails), it is supposedly a more efficient implementation than using Mongrel.

It is very interesting to see that Rails performed faster than two of the most efficient PHP frameworks.

Framework versions used in the benchmark: CodeIgniter 1.6.2, Kohana SVN, Rails 2.0.2.

Related posts

• Using Zend Framework with CodeIgniter (43)
• Notes on Choosing a PHP Framework: A Quick Comparison of CodeIgniter and Kohana (50)
• Kohana vs CodeIgniter: Speed and Memory Usage Performance Benchmark (14)
• Comparison: Ruby vs PHP, the Pros (5)
• Benchmark: LiteSpeed vs Apache (PHP and Plain HTML) (11)

We all know that CodeIgniter is a very fast framework, but how about Kohana? Kohana is packed with more features, so does that mean it is slower? Let’s find out.

The following benchmarks are done on my local Macbook Pro machine (C2D 2.4GHz + 4GB), Leopard 10.5.2, MAMP without any code optimisers or caches.

Because I don’t have *that* much free time, the tests are very simple. I created a simple database with three tables, and the application is going to insert data into the three tables separately, retrieve them in one single query with query binders (or ‘active record’ classes per CodeIgniter’s term) and then clean up the database tables. I’ve also included use of a text helper method: limit words, which is presented in both Kohana and CodeIgniter. Total number of SQL queries: 2204.

I have benchmarked against three applications: CodeIgniter 1.6.1, Kohana SVN (rev 2328) and Kohana 2.1.1.

First of all, let’s see what the profilers told us:

Execution time
CI 1.6.1: 0.5657s
K SVN: 0.5718s
K 2.1.1: 0.5787s

Memory usage (pre-controller)
CI 1.6.1: 642,136 bytes
K SVN: 1,097,976 bytes
K 2.1.1: 1,076,972 bytes

Memory usage (post-controller)
CI 1.6.1: 2,354,524 bytes
K SVN: 3,062,376 bytes
K 2.1.1: 3,026,884 bytes

As you can see, Kohana consumes a lot more memory than CodeIgniter, but their execution times are on par.

Let’s then remove the database functions and just loop through three paragraphs of Loren Iipsum text with the word limiter for 20,000 times, and use ab to test it for 100 times.

Results the lower the better (total time taken).

CI 1.6.1: 110.236098 seconds
K SVN: 130.211059 seconds
K 2.1.1: 130.662462 seconds

Finally, let’s do a ‘hello world’ with ab -c 10 -t 60 (10 concurrent users for 60 seconds). We assign ‘hello world’ to a view variable and pass it onto a blank view page.

Results the higher the better (requests per second).

CI 1.6.1: 122.18 [#/sec]
K SVN: 113.96 [#/sec]
K 2.1.1: 118.54 [#/sec]

As a comparison (just for fun), here are two results for CakePHP:

First run: 18.66 [#/sec]
Second run: 33.47 [#/sec]

The first run was done in default set up whilst the second one was done by using suggested tweaks. CakePHP is in a different league to CI and Kohana in my opinion. In both CI and Kohana, models are optional, but CakePHP revolves around models.

Once again, these tests are just for fun. :)

Related posts

• Ruby on Rails, Passenger (ModRails) vs CodeIgniter and Kohana (15)
• Using Zend Framework with CodeIgniter (43)
• Notes on Choosing a PHP Framework: A Quick Comparison of CodeIgniter and Kohana (50)
• Choosing a PHP Framework Round 2: Yii vs Kohana vs CodeIgniter (50)
• Yii Kohana Bridge updated: full Kohana flavour now added! (2)

It is really nice to see the CI community grow. Personally I think the user guide is sufficient for a user to get the feet wet, but I understand some people prefer to have a top-down learning approach.

The book is scheduled to finish by August, according to Elliot.

Related posts

• Ruby on Rails, Passenger (ModRails) vs CodeIgniter and Kohana (15)
• CodeIgniter – Loading Models and Database in One Hit (4)
• Using Zend Framework with CodeIgniter (43)
• Release: [Kohana Module] Authlite, for User Authentication (22)
• PHP Namespace – $this->sux (1)

When I was reading through my subscribed feeds I came across this post: Notes on Choosing a PHP Framework: A Comparison of CakePHP and the Zend Framework by Chad Kieffer.

Chad has done a great job comparing the two frameworks that he’s interested in. That inspired me to write something up for the frameworks that I prefer and use. :)

I began hunting for PHP frameworks ever since Ruby on Rails hit the street. Coincidentally one of the first PHP frameworks I played with was CakePHP. At that time CakePHP’s documentation was nearly non-existent so I had to seek for an alternative. I did a lot of searches, and researches, and finally I was happy to see CodeIgniter. Its user guide was what impressed me the most, I am sure many of the fellow CI users would agree with me on this one. Because of the excellent documentation, I was able to start working on projects right after I spent a few hours on the user guide! Developing apps on CI was such a breeze! Today, I develop web applications in CodeIgniter, Kohana and Zend Framework. If you want to find out how to use Zend Framework components with CI or Kohana, please read my previous blog entry: Using Zend Framework with CodeIgniter.

From version 1.2 when I first started coding on CI, to the newly released version 1.6.1 it sure is a long way. CodeIgniter has progressed well and gained many web developers’ trust, despite a few glitches. One of which was the spawn of the fork: Kohana.

CodeIgniter had some low periods where developers were all focused on pushing out new releases of ExpressionEngine, their commercial blogging/cms product. Some of the users on the CI forum got frustrated because their bug reports and feature requests were ignored. As a result of that, BlueFlame was born, and later renamed to Kohana.

Kohana is relatively unknown to the public. In fact, most of the Kohana users are ex-CI users or users that uses both CI and Kohana (like myself). According to the Kohana homepage and Wikipedia, the differences between Kohana and CodeIgniter are:

1. Strict PHP5 OOP. Offers many benefits: visibility protection, automatic class loading, overloading, interfaces, abstracts, and singletons.
2. Kohana has joined the GoPHP5 initiative. All releases from 2.2 on will conform with this project.
3. Continues CodeIgniter design patterns. Anyone who has used CodeIgniter will quickly understand Kohana’s structure and design patterns.
4. Community, not company, driven. Kohana is driven by community discussion, ideas, and code. Kohana developers are from all around the world, each with their own talents. This allows a rapid and flexible development cycle that can respond to bugs and requests within hours, instead of days or months.
5. GET, POST, COOKIE, and SESSION arrays all work as expected. Kohana does not limit your access to global data, but offers the same filtering and XSS protection that CodeIgniter does.
6. Cascading resources, modules, and inheritance. Controllers, models, libraries, helpers, and views can be loaded from any location within your system, application, or module paths. Configuration options are inherited and can by dynamically overwritten by each application.
7. No namespace conflicts. Class suffixes, like _Controller, are used to prevent namespace conflicts. This allows a User’s controller and Users model to both be loaded at the same time.
8. True auto-loading of classes. This includes libraries, controllers, models, and helpers. This is not pre-loading, but true dynamic loading of classes, as they are requested.
9. Helpers are static classes, not functions. For example, instead of using form_open(), you would use form::open().
10. Library drivers and API consistency. Libraries can use different “drivers” to handle different external APIs transparently. For example, multiple session storage options are available (database, cookie, and native), but the same interface is used for all of them. This allows new drivers to be developed for existing libraries, which keeps the API consistent and transparent.
11. Powerful event handler. Kohana events can by dynamically added to, replaced, or even removed completely. This allows many changes to Kohana execution process, without modification to existing system code.

As you can see, whilst maintaining a certain level of similarity to CodeIgniter, Kohana does offer some advantages (at the same time, some disadvantages). Let’s take a look at a few quick comparisons. Grading scale: Limited < Fair < Good < Excellent. Please note: if a feature is not available in the distributed package, but is available via 3rd party libraries, I will state that in the comparison. If a feature is available both in the distributed package and via 3rd party libraries, only the official one will get assessed.

The Verdict

I had a hard time deciding which of these two I use. In the end, I chose to use both. Why? Because they each have its advantages and disadvantages.

CodeIgniter is great for small to medium sized projects, especially good for legacy servers which have PHP4 installed. The fantastic user guide made coding in CI very efficient.

Kohana is probably better for larger sized projects as well as projects that need more flexible extensions. PHP5 offers better (proper) OOP support as the foundation, plus Kohana’s several better feature implementation make it a strong competitor to its predecessor.

There is no right or wrong for which framework you use, everyone has its own taste. For me, CodeIgniter’s excellent documentation and Kohana’s strict PHP5 + easy to use are the primary reasons to choose them over say, CakePHP and Symfony. That said, CakePHP, Symfony and other frameworks are all excellent choices depending on your taste and experience. On one hand I envy the Ruby community because they obviously have the de facto framework to work with, on another hand, we have more options hey? :)

Feel free to share your opinion and experiences!

Update log:

[2008-02-23]
– Removed MS SQL support for Kohana (confirmed by Shadowhand)
– Updated cache driver description for Kohana (confirmed by Shadowhand)
– Edited unicode / UTF8 description for Kohana (confirmed by Shadowhand)

Related posts

• Using Zend Framework with CodeIgniter (43)
• Choosing a PHP Framework Round 2: Yii vs Kohana vs CodeIgniter (50)
• Ruby on Rails, Passenger (ModRails) vs CodeIgniter and Kohana (15)
• Layerful Framework Performance in Kohana (1)
• Kohana extended, transparently :) (4)

Whilst Daniel has done a great job demonstrating the possibility of using the two frameworks together, concerns have been made: do we actually need to use hooks?

As I understand it, hooks are used to extend the core functionalities of CodeIgniter (as explained in the user guide). Obviously Zend Framework and CodeIgniter are two different systems and there is no intention for us to extend CodeIgniter’s core functionality with Zend Framework.

Using hooks can be dangerous as it’s system-wide, and it modifies the system behaviour.

What I have done is to simply use CodeIgniter’s library structure to load the Zend Framework resources. Below is the tutorial.

Assuming you already have CodeIgniter installed. If not please refer to the user guide for installation.

1. Download Zend Framework from the official website.
2. Unzip the Zend Framework package, and copy the Zend folder (under Library) to your CodeIgniter installation’s application/libraries/. You can actually place the folder anywhere, but remember to alter the script accordingly (read the comments in the script!).
3. Place the library script (provided at the end of the post) in application/libraries/
4. Done! That’s all you need to do. Now, let us see an example of using the library.

Usage Sample

<?php

class Welcome extends Controller {

	function Welcome()
	{
		parent::Controller();
	}

	function index()
	{
		$this->load->library('zend', 'Zend/Service/Flickr');
		// newer versions of CodeIgniter have updated its loader API slightly,
		// we can no longer pass parameters to our library constructors
		// therefore, we should load the library like this:
		// $this->load->library('zend');
		// $this->zend->load('Zend/Service/Flickr');

		$flickr = new Zend_Service_Flickr('YOUR_FLICKR_API_KEY');

		$results = $flickr->tagSearch('php');
		foreach ($results as $result)
		{
			echo $result->title . '<br />';
		}
		//$this->load->view('welcome_message');
	}
}
?>

Library Script

Copy the code and paste it to a new file called Zend.php in application/libraries/.

<?php if (!defined('BASEPATH')) {exit('No direct script access allowed');}

/**
 * Zend Framework Loader
 *
 * Put the 'Zend' folder (unpacked from the Zend Framework package, under 'Library')
 * in CI installation's 'application/libraries' folder
 * You can put it elsewhere but remember to alter the script accordingly
 *
 * Usage:
 *   1) $this->load->library('zend', 'Zend/Package/Name');
 *   or
 *   2) $this->load->library('zend');
 *      then $this->zend->load('Zend/Package/Name');
 *
 * * the second usage is useful for autoloading the Zend Framework library
 * * Zend/Package/Name does not need the '.php' at the end
 */
class CI_Zend
{
	/**
	 * Constructor
	 *
	 * @param	string $class class name
	 */
	function __construct($class = NULL)
	{
		// include path for Zend Framework
		// alter it accordingly if you have put the 'Zend' folder elsewhere
		ini_set('include_path',
		ini_get('include_path') . PATH_SEPARATOR . APPPATH . 'libraries');

		if ($class)
		{
			require_once (string) $class . EXT;
			log_message('debug', "Zend Class $class Loaded");
		}
		else
		{
			log_message('debug', "Zend Class Initialized");
		}
	}

	/**
	 * Zend Class Loader
	 *
	 * @param	string $class class name
	 */
	function load($class)
	{
		require_once (string) $class . EXT;
		log_message('debug', "Zend Class $class Loaded");
	}
}

?>

Happy coding! Oh and don’t forget, Zend Framework is PHP 5 only, so it won’t work on your PHP 4 installation.

Update: Using it with Kohana

Update: The following instructions are deprecated, please follow the updated one here.

Even though Kohana has the ability to load vendor classes, I still find it useful to use the library approach so that loading Zend Framework libraries will be transparent. :)

Usage is exactly the same as in CodeIgniter.

<?php defined('SYSPATH') or die('No direct script access.');

/**
 * Zend Framework Loader
 *
 * Put the 'Zend' folder (unpacked from the Zend Framework package, under 'Library')
 * in CI installation's 'application/libraries' folder
 * You can put it elsewhere but remember to alter the script accordingly
 *
 * Usage:
 *   1) $this->load->library('zend', 'Zend/Package/Name');
 *   or
 *   2) $this->load->library('zend');
 *      then $this->zend->load('Zend/Package/Name');
 *
 * * the second usage is useful for autoloading the Zend Framework library
 * * Zend/Package/Name does not need the '.php' at the end
 */
class Zend
{
	/**
	 * Constructor
	 *
	 * @param	string $class class name
	 */
	function __construct($class = NULL)
	{
		// include path for Zend Framework
		// alter it accordingly if you have put the 'Zend' folder elsewhere
		ini_set('include_path',
		ini_get('include_path') . PATH_SEPARATOR . APPPATH . 'libraries');

		if ($class)
		{
			require_once (string) $class . EXT;
			Log::add('debug', "Zend Class $class Loaded");
		}
		else
		{
			Log::add('debug', "Zend Class Initialized");
		}
	}

	/**
	 * Zend Class Loader
	 *
	 * @param	string $class class name
	 */
	function load($class)
	{
		require_once (string) $class . EXT;
		Log::add('debug', "Zend Class $class Loaded");
	}
}

?>

Related posts

• Notes on Choosing a PHP Framework: A Quick Comparison of CodeIgniter and Kohana (50)
• Choosing a PHP Framework Round 2: Yii vs Kohana vs CodeIgniter (50)
• Ruby on Rails, Passenger (ModRails) vs CodeIgniter and Kohana (15)
• Layerful Framework Performance in Kohana (1)
• Kohana extended, transparently :) (4)