I am, above all other things, a programmer. I'm one of those guys that stay up late writing code, reading technical reference manuals, and drooling over case tools. So I suppose it comes as no surprise that my newest obsession focuses on a tantalizing new PHP framework a friend of mine recently turned me on to, CodeIgniter.

CodeIgniter interests me so much because it implements a Model-View-Controller development pattern. M-V-C is a big fad in web development right now, with good reason. As the awesome people at EllissLab will tell you, "MVC is a software approach that separates application logic from presentation". In a nutshell, it means we have content separate from structure separate from style. That is something of a Holy Grail for web developers, since it makes our web sites ever so much more efficient, clean, and easy to maintain.

With a good framework like CodeIgniter, you could build a custom CMS to rival pretty much any popular software in use today (Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla), but without the need to spend weeks working weird bugs out.

I also have been turned on to CakePHP, a very similar MVC framework. It's user docs seem to be a little easier to read, and the website definitely is appealing. I mean, who doesn't like cake?

:)

I haven't had time to do more than browse about half of the user manual for each framework, but from what I have read so far, I know what I am using for my next big project...

Check them out, and if you have time to try either for yourself, please leave some comments here and tell us what you think!