Kohana development begun on 31 May 2007 when a few CodeIgniter community members decided to start a community fork of CodeIgniter, named BlueFlame.
In June 2007 the project was renamed "Kohana" and in July version 1.0 was released without any documentation. The project leader left in August and development stagnated until September when a new BDFL was selected and an effort to rewrite the source code began. At that time Kohana had only 3 developers.
Version 2.0 was released in November 2007, based purely on PHP 5.0 and a new OOP framework.
Version 3.0 was released on 9 September 2009.
The latest version 3.3.6 was released on 25. July 2016.