[edtechre]

I actually agree here. CI is barely a framework. When I used it, I found myself writing a bunch of custom code to handle encapsulating view logic like widgets, decorators, etc. Plus, plenty of other code to handle form validation etc. Other frameworks provide all of this out of the box.

I dislike ZF because it tries too hard to be like Java/Struts2, and borrows a lot of Java's verbosity and bloat.

I use Yii a lot nowadays, and use phing for deployments. And for Python folks, I'd recommend web2py since it has a lot of similarities to Yii from what I've seen.