Kenny Katzgrau has a new post with the top ten Sparks (CodeIgniter packages) for the year of 2011:

It's a moderately simple app that provides a vehicle for quickly dropping other developers' code in your codebase. Many of the packages on GetSparks are very well maintained. I am continually impressed by the amount of effort spark developers pour into their submissions when I peruse the site and try new packages out. [...] GetSparks has almost clocked 50,000 package downloads at this point, but there are handful of sparks that have really stood out in terms of popularity.

Packages in the top ten list by popularity include (in no particular order) php-activerecord, template, gravatar_helper and markdown. He also thanks a few of the folks that have made the GetSparks.org site what it is.