[eluser]OverZealous[/eluser]
I appreciate the compliment!
I doubt very much that something like DataMapper would ever get included in the core of CodeIgniter. It has a pretty heavy overhead if it isn't something you want to use (e.g.: loading all of your models into memory).
CodeIgniter has a fairly well rounded extension mechanism, though. The openness of the mechanism is what allows something like CodeIgniter, or the other ORM toolkits, to be built. If they declared a specific model, or specific library, format, it would significantly limit the ability to write something like DM.
It seems to me that it would be very easy to write scaffolding code that works on top of DataMapper/DMZ. It has a very simple structure, and all of the fields are declared directly (either through $validation or through the $fields array). For my code, I added a 'type' element to my $validation arrays. This, along with a custom class that gets loaded as needed, allows me to generate both editing fields and render dates, numbers, currency, and multi-line text very easily.
However, scaffolds in general are a quick way to show data, but they almost always fail under any sort of real work. By the time they offer enough customization to be truly useful (conditionals, adding security checks, adjusting layout), they have practically duplicated using basic PHP templates!
