A VERY OLD (ie don't use) PHP MVC Framework
I made Orqi about 5 years ago around the time Ruby on Rails came out. At the time I was enamoured by the new and shiny syntax of Ruby and all the tools and support you got with Rails so I started to look into it. I planned to use it on an upcoming project, but for reasons that escape me now I decided it would be quicker to get this site done in PHP (in those days PHP was my preferred language) but I would take the architecture from Rails and incorporate it into the project.
The result was surprisingly successful considering I chose to ignore an existing framework and build my own. Orqi quickly became an environment where I could churn out sites for people in a short space of time, functionality not in the framework could be easily incorporated into the architecture and absorbed into the project timelines, because -hey- when it's YOUR framework you know it INSIDE-OUT and since the first project I had to work with another developer, the core classes were all commented.
In the end though the PHP community started to spawn a ton of frameworks; CakePHP, Code Igniter, Symfony, Yii, Zend (now there's Fuel and Laravel) and it just didn't make sense to be a community of one developer working in a framework noone had heard of, especially as a freelancer. As painful as it was I dumped my baby and started using the frameworks in the community.
Looking back writing this now, definitely would recommend going through the experience. You learn a heap load about what it takes to actually build a framework, where to put your code, how you're going to incorporate 3rd party code into your projects and it will feed into how you do things in the future.
hugs and kisses Daaaaave.
footnote: seriously don't use this framework, it's old!!!