This seems to be a glorified front controller integrated with a templating engine.
It is really cool that they did this as a PECL extension. I had a PHP framework many years ago that we considered converting to a PECL extension (http://sourceforge.net/projects/cep/).
Generally, models can be left up to the developer to create based on business logic. Take for example, Zend Framework. It provides an active record like pattern in its Zend_Db_Table but expects the individual application to create the models that use (not inherit) Zend_Db_Table.
This seems to be a glorified front controller integrated with a templating engine.
It is really cool that they did this as a PECL extension. I had a PHP framework many years ago that we considered converting to a PECL extension (http://sourceforge.net/projects/cep/).