Kohana (php 5) differences with codeigniter..

[eluser]CI2RULZ[/eluser]
I have nothing against Kohana, but a solely community based project (versus a company & community based project) is actually a turn off to me. A company has some vested interest in success versus a community only driven project which is all about helping themselves debug a feature they think would be cool to framework (in my humble opinion). In the case of CI, EL has A LOT of interest since their commercial CMS is now being built on it. The financials of their company partially ride on the back of CI... that's powerful stuff.

Who knows what the future will hold, but in my opinion I think CI and ZF will remain in the limelight for years. Other frameworks will come and go, getting hot for a year or two then fizzle, but without a large movement of people in total disgust of the major players, I don't see them lasting over the long haul. Sure, open source in general has been a community based movement that's worked, but that's because of the level of total disgust with microsoft in general, which can not be said for companies within the open source community.

Maybe I look at things differently, but job security, rapid development methods (which doesn't come as much from technology as it does familiarity in my experience), and marketable skill sets are important to make this a life long career. I don't have the time to learn 5, 10, or maybe more frameworks over that time, and ultimately is not beneficial to my goals compared to mastering one or two that serve my needs for many years. Because if I'm going to waste that much time relearning skill sets, I might as well jump ship now and learn C#.NET and Sharepoint and sit back at a ridiculously high paying corporate job and be done with it. I'll stare at a wall all day and be subjected to permanent geekhood... but I'll be rich. We PHPers open source it because we love developing great websites for clients. Open source is all about client based work, so high turn around is the key to our success.

Ultimately OP, try both frameworks and pull the trigger. At the end of the day, it's just code, and no one said you had to use a framework at all. 8-/ Back before .NET came out and PHPers got a little crazy, starting with an inferiority complex arising, and ending with every coder with a website releasing some brand of framework to shut their MS buddys pie hole, we used contexual php and it worked just fine. Figure out the fastest way to develop websites, no matter what method that is, and you can actually make a great living in the open source world.