We do maintenence on a number of systems.

I'm finally in a place where I'm teh fucking boss for once, and have to design a large system that will have a long maintenance contract.

There's a couple of tasks I find myself always repeating:

1) similar tasks for users with JS and those without 2) similar things for contents and rss/atom feeds, etc.

To combat these I will need appropriate handling of assets (think JS files, CSS, themes/templates, etc.), excellent auth/user systems, javascript/ajax forethought, appropriate model setups. Codeigniter fails on many of these. Basically, with enough time I could build this system with Zend, but I'm curious what else is out there as Zend is also kind of a heavy-weight. We need something that is Rapid but maintainable, CodeIgniter is not maintainable.

We will have a lot of AJAX APIs in place for the design team to play with. At first I thought jQuery was cool, but now I'm looking at Dojo.