The author seems to not make a distinction between a web application of some sort and then a website. If he's making a website for a client, I really doubt tha

The author seems to not make a distinction between a web application of some sort and then a website. If he's making a website for a client, I really doubt that he likes to write all the code to edit pages, blog, update images etc himself for each project. It's much easier to base your project on a preexisting solution like WP, joomla, etc. However, if he's making a web application, using joomla/WP is a complete nonsense, so using a framework like Code Igniter is perfect. He doesn't have to use the ORM if he doesn't want to, he doesn't have to use the forking if he doesn't have to. Code Igniter is super lightweight. On PHP's faults: When you've been working with PHP for a long time, all those issues mostly become non-issues, documentation reference lookup using http://php.net/<searchterm&#62 http://php.net/<searchterm> is super sweet, the arrays with all the array functions make arrays incredibly powerful, you can turn off all the automatic sanitizing code if you dont' want it, etc... We've all seen UGLY php code, but that's just because the barrier to entry into becoming a PHP developer is so small, so there's a lot of bad coders out there. But if you do things right, PHP development is very stable, you can do incredible amounts of work in a short period of time and the amount of information and pre-built code out there is vast.