My personal gripe with Code Igniter is that it doesn't have a built-in templating language (this is by design).

I absolutely love Smarty (smarty.net) and highly recommend it and have used it in many projects so far.

There have been attempts to integrate Smarty into CI but I saw a benchmark that showed that combination was unacceptably slow and won't scale well.

Thanks for the link to Smarty. I'm checking it out now.