I've used CI on several projects. I've also used Rails. Here's my take on CI. The good stuff: * GREAT documentation * Code was designed around performance, an

I've used CI on several projects. I've also used Rails. Here's my take on CI. The good stuff: * GREAT documentation * Code was designed around performance, and it is pretty darn quick. * PHP4 based. (This, btw, is only a plus for a tiny few people. There's no need to be on PHP4 any more.) The bad: * The "model" layer is not really an ORM at all. It's just a slightly fancy way of wrapping SQL statements. This is better than no separation of concerns, but it's not really an object oriented way of accessing the model layer. * It misses out on all the great things that are going on with PHP5. * It's open source but privately developed. The pace of evolution is glacially slow, and decisions about the direction of the framework are made closed doors. To me, CI is a HUGE advance over throwing code together in php files, but it doesn't really have enough abstractions to qualify as a true MVC framework. If you do decide you like CI, check out kohana php. This is an open source, community developed fork of CI -- that's built for PHP5. For what it's worth, I'm far happier coding in Rails (and the little bit of django I've tried), and would probably recommend those if you're not afraid of abandoning php.