Well it was originally a fork of CI. Version 2 was a recode but using the same inspiration. Version 3 is another rebuild but a more developed version of the idea (i.e. unrecognisable from it's CI origins).
It's about preference I guess: Kohana takes advantage of a lot of the PHP5 extra's and also unfucks some of the "gotcha's" CI had (especially in the area of loading stuff). Also it is updated more regularly and is community developed.
CI is still good, I personally prefer Kohana's way of doing it.
I thought it was a recent fork of the project - I stand corrected. Kohana certainly does look good. I'm just getting to grips with CI now. Authentication has been a matter of bolting on a 3rd party library. Would you recommend a switch to Kohana? I'm mostly concerned by the long-term support and development for each of them.
EDIT: Just realised that I'm asking you to sum up a lot to recommend one over the other. I'm currently looking at both in detail, cheers.
I'd recommend it yes. Kohana is a bit of a hackers framework - you do need to dig inside it sometimes (I consider that a good thing). It also has a pretty nice ORM based / Role based auth module included which you can extend fairly easily.
In terms of LTS: V2 is pretty frozen at 2.4 right now (i.e. no API changes) though the documentation still reflects V2.3. There should only be bug fixes on the 2.x branch. 3.x is in active development (and worth looking at) and should be there for the long haul.
I personally use 2.x because that is what I started with and I haven't had chance to make the switch to 3.x (it's pretty much the same except there are changes to some naming conventions and file paths) mostly due to having to support 2.x based sites still :)
