According to this recent post the folks over at EllisLab are looking for new "owners" for the CodeIgniter project.

CodeIgniter is one of the world’s most popular Open Source PHP frameworks, used by thousands of developers powering hundreds of thousands of sites, in addition to being deployed as the underpinning of every ExpressionEngine installation. Throughout its seven year life thus far, CodeIgniter has consistently received praise for being both speedy and surefooted. Small and lightweight, resistant to feature bloat, retaining compatibility with contemporary technology, the framework earned the reputation of being low-risk and high-gain, which fueled its worldwide adoption. So why are we we looking for a new home for CodeIgniter?

They go on, talking about their reasoning behind moving on from CodeIgniter - mostly it's concerning the resources they have available and the things they, as a company, want to focus on:

CodeIgniter will be best served by someone with a focused vision for it, along with the resources to achieve that vision. It needs someone to skillfully utilize the brand’s immense traffic, and direct the thousands of voices of input towards common goals. EllisLab can’t provide those things without adopting a fundamentally different business model or taking attention away from our primary flywheel. CodeIgniter deserves to be someone’s primary flywheel.

Phil Sturgeon, one of those selected to a spot in the Engineer group of the CodeIgniter Reactor community branch, has posted a few thoughts of his own about the moves EllisLab has made and the reaction from the community he's seen.

Since what some have referred to as "CodeIgniter-gate" EllisLab's have done a great job of listening to the points raised by me and other members of the community and in part I believe we have effected change. [...] Good news right? Hell yes. This is exactly what the CodeIgniter community has been looking for. EllisLab need to keep their core version working for themselves of course and have always suggested that if a feature is to be integrated then it needs to be heavily tested first.

He follows this with a "but" in the form of a few common comments from the community - unfortunately negative. He also mentions the UserVoice forum where developers can suggest new features and hash out ones suggested by others. If you'd like to contribute code, you can still fork the main repository for now and push back with pull requests.

According to this new post on CodeIgniter.com, EllisLab is announcing an official fork of the current CodeIgniter framework that will be driven by a group of six community members.

Yes, you read that right, EllisLab will be creating a CodeIgniter fork. For you. By you. We need six talented, opinionated, critical coders from the community who have a heavy personal and/or professional interest in CodeIgniter's ongoing development to act as deputies for the repository. [...] You can also nominate someone else for one of the six seats by emailing the above information on their behalf.

EllisLab will be going over the applications for the next few weeks and may ask the community to help them narrow things down. An NDA will have to be signed by the selected group and a rollout of this new fork is planned for sometime in Q1 of 2011.

In a response to some of the things said in this post to the CodeIgniter blog, Phil Sturgeon has posted some thoughts of his own about how the company (EllisLab) is currently handling the CodeIgniter framework and what kind of future he sees out there for it.

Times have been hard for the developers of CodeIgniter - EllisLab and they have addressed this in a few ways: A spot on the ExpressionEngine Podcast, a few articles explaining the future of EllisLab and ExpressionEngine and how they plan to take things forward. Sadly, as always us CodeIgniter developers have been left with not much more than a nod and a pat on the head.

He mentions some of their responses and what he sees happening in the CodeIgniter community - a "stable enough" version of CodeIgniter 2, the departure of two members of the EllisLab staff who had large impacts on CodeIgniter and the change and involvement that seems to be happening in several community resources (hint: numbers are dropping dramatically).

Be sure to check out the comments for opinions from CodeIgniter users, community members and thoughts from an employee of EllisLab (Derek Jones).

Derick Allard (of the EllisLab team) has posted an update about the current and future state of the CodeIgniter framework and its community.

Some of the updates include:

• That Jamie Rumbelow has taken over as a Community Chieftain
• Rick Ellis is on twitter now
• A long list of bugs and updates to the CodeIgniter source

And, of course, he (sort of) answers the constant question he and his fellow developers get - when will CodeIgniter 2 be released and what will be in it?