I went kind of in another direction a few years ago - CodeIgniter's routing/sessions/etc base was plenty for most of my projects, but I wanted a real ORM. So I

I went kind of in another direction a few years ago - CodeIgniter's routing/sessions/etc base was plenty for most of my projects, but I wanted a real ORM. So I integrated Eloquent from Laravel and ignored the built-in CI database layer. A bunch of these sites are still running smoothly on modern PHP.