Today we announce the launch of our first PHP open source initiative at the Huffington Post -- Kohere. Much of the Huffington Post platform is built on PHP. Internally, we have established the concept of guilds to congregate members of the tech team around various technologies to improve cross-team communication, encourage learning and sharing, and discuss emerging trends. Our PHP guild has worked to promulgate standards around coding style and syntax and internal framework standardization.
After much discussion and debate, we standardized on Kohana as the core framework that new major projects would be based on. We felt that Kohana is lightweight enough to stay out of the way but powerful enough to significantly improve developer efficiency. Given its modular design, Kohana allows one team to build a model of functionality and share that with other teams that may have similar needs. Its modular functionality also allows to only enable necessary components for a given application, reducing overhead.
Kohana is an MVC framework and as such allows business logic, data access, and logic for rendering to be easily separated. In developing PHP applications with Kohana, we felt it would be useful to incorporate Smarty templates to improve flexibility within our views. Smarty is a popular PHP templating engine that builds on a markup language elegantly incorporated into HTML. Syntactically, Smarty is much more concise than embedding raw PHP into views, thus improving readability.
Kohere is a module for the Kohana framework that loads the Smarty templating engine and facilitates easily passing data into Smarty for use within templates. Data passed to the view will be seen by Smarty as an assigned variable and can be used in a template. Templates can then be used to render views.
The Huffington Post Tech Team is proud to have Kohere as our first open source project. We look forward to launching more open source products as well as working with the community in improving and extending our code. We invite all developers interested in Kohana and Smarty to fork our repository on github and contribute back your own changes. Kohere is released under the Apache License (Version 2.0), and we encourage widespread use and feedback.
Fork us on github: https://github.com/huffingtonpost/Kohere