For the last year I spent a lot of my PHP time playing with CakePHP I like it at first, but when I tried to build large applications with it I noticed it have major issues with performance, plus I really had difficult time dealing with it is strict naming convention and it object-relational-mapping (ORM).
Few days ago I read about CodeIgniter framework and its similarities to CakePHP and its amazing performance, so I went and visited their website again, I heard about CodeIgniter before from Abdullah Aldosari (I miss our technical discussions) but when I visited the website I wasn’t really impressed, but the new website looks much better, so judging by the look improvement alone I decided to give it a try 
My first impressions are good, things I liked about CodeIgniter so far:
- There is no magic, what you write is what you get, you need to explicitly define what you need.
- Very fast.
- You can have directories in your controller,model, or view. I really hated CakePHP flat structure
It is still very early for me to discover its shortcoming, but so far I like.
CodeIgniter does seem really interesting and I keep hearing good things about it. I’m looking at frameworks now and will probably build my next project with one. One thing I’m interested in trying out (which I don’t think CI has) is something with Rails-style ActiveRecord. Probably Cake or Symfony. Interesting to see that you disliked Cake, I’m also hearing Symfony is a bit hard to configure at the beginning.
Ever tried Zend? That looks good too.
Jihad
11 Feb 08 at 2:15 am
They have simple ActiveRecord implementation, but personally I didn’t like it that much in CakePHP, although Rails implementation is much more advanced.
For me automating inserting, updating, and simple select would be good enough for me, I think writing advance select queries would be easier and more efficient in SQL rather that ORM code.
Rayed
11 Feb 08 at 2:14 pm
I agree with Rayed. Although I’m addicted to Drupal those days, I believe CI is a quick start, I remember in the first day I start writing.
Abdullah Al-Dosari
11 Feb 08 at 11:27 pm