Obviously I’m not on the ball with this one as the CodeIgniter team popped out another release, version 1.6.1, on Feb 12, 2008.
1.6.1 is consider a maintenance release but it does include some interesting new features such as active record caching and a path helper.
The official release text and link to changelog can be viewed at http://codeigniter.com/news/codeigniter_161_released/
I don't think you would have been disappointed with MODx. The 0.9.6.x version has matured to verstion 1.0 now. It is alive and well, and an EXCELLENT tool. The 0.9.7 version is now called version 2.0, and is turning into a great tool also.
Hey Ryan F. I had checked out MODx again not too long ago and not much had changed. I see in the meantime they've "finally" (that's their quote) released the latest 1.0 which includes a codebase rewrite. That was one of the reasons I wasn't interested in it. I prefer a more stable project that's not all about rewriting all the time. I'll definitely take a look at it again now though.
im new to PHP im just learning for a while , and im just wondering if i use codeIgniter instead of plain PHP will this make difference when implementing the lessons i learn? maybe it will help me to understand the framework(at least)?