Pick any three aspects of PHP that makes you feel dirty as a developer, and post them as a comment here.

For me it’s:

• The standard library is a huge, monolithic mess. This has been covered before, so I won’t beat a dead horse. I’d love to see the standard library reorganized and some sanity introduced around the naming of certain aspects.
• Superglobals because they behave weirdly in certain scenarios and make unit testing a pain in the ass.
• omg\namespace\separator\is\Backslash, which has effectively killed this long-awaited feature for me.

Again, I don’t intend for this to be about hating on PHP or its developers (read: comments that don’t contribute anything meaningful to the discussion won’t see the light of day). Instead, I want to formalize what causes people pain when working with PHP today. Who knows — maybe somebody, somewhere will listen?

This is high praise coming from me. Despite the six years of commercial PHP development behind me, I think PHP sucks. Further, I’ve rejected outright frameworks like CakePHP and Symfony, most of which feel like they were too busy wishing they were Rails and doing a little too much “magic”. Ruby makes the magic in Rails beautiful and manageable. In PHP, things feel far less elegant and the “Rails-esque” PHP frameworks often reflect that awkwardness. CodeIgniter avoids this pitfall by providing a solid foundation on which to build web applications and sites without getting the way.

It’s not all roses though. Like any other framework, CodeIgniter has its warts: The validation and pagination libraries are a little awkward to configure, the “Model” portion of the MVC framework feels relatively weak, it wouldn’t hurt to merge some libraries/helpers and add others with more utility. Inevitably you still suffer from PHP’s shortcomings: a flat namespace, shit OOP support (for PHP4, anyway) and the unpredictable naming conventions of the standard library. Not that this is CodeIgniter’s fault, just another failing of the PHP as a development language and platform.

On the whole, however, CodeIgniter gives a big bang for its buck and, given a few years, could prove to be a formidable framework indeed should Zend come up short. I highly recommend giving it a careful look and evaluating it for your next web project.