PHP function-enhancement libraries intended for plain-vanilla php

Question

Background: There are numerous PHP addons out there that have some nice ideas, but they represent a significant investment in either time or resources. For example there are frameworks like codeignighter or Smarty templating.

Although some find these useful, and others find them not-so-much, there is no debating that there are a lot of projects out there intended to streamline PHP development, and "mold" it into a new image.

Question: I am wondering if there are any frameworks out there that do not try to "re-invent" PHP, but still add some nice enhancements for making PHP a little bit "improved" (such as, for example, organizing the native PHP functions with "$haystack and $needle" arguments to always take arguments in the same order, or providing object-oriented strings, so you can do things like):

 print($MyName->toUpperCase()->trim());

Rationale: Just asking.

Answer 1

Have a look at Kohana. I'm not saying it does exactly what you want, but it is allegedly a very light-weight framework.