Zend Framework. CodeIgniter. A Brief History 2006: CodeIgniter was born.
CodeIgniter is a powerful open-source PHP framework with a very small footprint, created by Rick Ellis in 2006. CodeIgniter was born from ExpressionEngine, essentially a collection of refactored classes originally written for EllisLab's flagship CMS. Stripped of the application-specific functionality, CodeIgniter was made to be a simple and elegant toolkit, enabling rapid development of both web sites and web applications, attracting thousands of talented PHP developers. 2008: Industry leader. Yii Framework: Best for Web 2.0 Development. CakePHP: the rapid development php framework. Pages.