Are you looking to develop a site for a client? No problem, You can use Codeigniter and a few modules to create a Templated Modulated Content Management System. With Authentication, Authorization, Crud, Modular Extensions ,Smarty Template System and my Environ Library(smarty-hmvc-environment-variables).
This environ library holds the state of your templates, where the templates come from and the content there in. Settings can be stored in files or mysql.
It parses CodeIgniter View Syntax on top of smarty. This is freakin' Awesome. I shit you NOT. (Pardon my lang)
The thing is that it has so much power that it tends to make your code messy. Because there are so many ways to access the data. But if you have good separation via directories and or symlinks, it will be very nice.
If you have to backup or move the app to another folder/server you will have problems propagating the symlinks. I'm sure there's a better way to accomplish this aspect of the application base layer.
You can add custom functions to smarty it's not hard.
If you use Dreamweaver or are used to a certain syntax highlighting of some sort you can make all smarty code start with