After some tinkering with CodeIgniter, i’ve setup a small playground (which will hopefully grow over time) to test drive the framework.
I like the framework for it’s lightness- and you get quite a lot of control without having to rely on helpers to do _everything_. You can learn the helpers as you need to, so getting something up and running is easy enough and requires no massive investment in a proprietary methodology, terminology, apiology or documentology.
As for rhe RoR-ish slant. It is well… erm… RoR-ish. But really, nothing beats RoR. CodeIgniter is not bad. Rails still kicks!