Umm, seriously? All these years I've been using mysqldump (sometimes even with --xml!) I could have just been using a script that string concats XML fragments together. That's a waaaay better backup procedure. </sarcasm>
I've done CodeIgniter and Kohana, and I've moved to Recess http://recessframework.org/ . New project website coming Any Day Now, or stop by #recess on freenode if you want to see what we're about.