Do you think Expression Engine will eventually be refactored using CodeIgniter?  Below are a few reasons why I think this is a strong possibility.  Obviously, this is all speculation and I do not know the actual effort that would be involved in such a project.  I’m just a big fan of CI and think this would be a big boost for the framework .  I’m not affiliated with EllisLab in any way.

1) Since the major rebranding of EllisLab a few weeks ago, CI is now clearly positioned as a central asset to the company.  We were initially clued-in to this by Rick in late January.

2) Now that CI is being formally developed by the EllisLab team, it makes sense to maintain only one central codebase.

3) The CI codebase was initially extracted from EE and shares many similarities.

4) EllisLab could leverage the rapidly growing CI community to build EE extensions.  The CI community would also be a great source of potential sales.

5) Did they really hire Derek Allard to only work on EE support?    Rick did mention that they “hope to expand his role into development and various other areas”.  Hiring is usually an early clue into future business plans.

6) What better way to legitimize a framework than using it as the base of your core revenue generating services (“eating your own dog food”).  EE built using CI would also be the premier CI application showcase.  Equivalent to how 37 Signals uses Ruby on Rails for all their products and services.

What do you think?