CodeIgniter Does It For Me

@donpwinston I can fully understand what you mean. I chose CI3 lately for my business project and I am loving it   I have to admit that I am a junior web developer with 3 years of experience on my shoulders. At first I "learned" PHP, basic OOP principles, HTML, CSS, JS etc. and then the company I was working on decided that I should learn Symfony 1 (and Symfony 2 later) and it was a pits. This decision was one of the worst in my life. There was so much magic happening in the back of Symfony that I thought I had the wrong job. I couldn't get to it at this stage.

Programming with Symfony felt like: Alright everything is configured well (after a lot of time), the database is set up and I am rdy to go (after some CLI commands). Then I type sth. like generateWebsite(), magic happens and hopefully it will show the website as I want it to be, but nooooooo   it doesn't. And I spend hours of hours to get a feel for what is happening in the background and how to customize magic behaviours. It really felt like a full stack web framework which doesn't fit my programming style/my needs. Then I quitted programming for quite some time (1,5 years) because I thought I am just not smart enough to get this deep into the magic as I wanted to get into it.

Then I revisited php-programming because I had still sth. in me that wanted to build things. I decided: This time I will compare frameworks on a basic level and stick to sth. with a great documentation. That's how I found CodeIgniter. I started with the tutorial followed by a small webapp after that. And how does it feel to programm with CodeIgniter? For me it's like VIM for PHP (PHPIM - PHP improved). I'm feeling more like a developer than I did at the Symfony days. I have all the control over my program. There is (at this stage) literally nothing, that feels magic to me. It's more like writing pure php code with the help of a toolkit. You can use things but you don't have to. You have the freedom (instead of learning a lot of conventions/configurations). I can concentrate more on dealing with complex algorithms instead of figuring out how the framework works.

And I can see ppl. pointing out: CodeIgniter does lack a lot of features e.g. an authentification system. But you can build it yourself if you need to. And I think it don't has to. It's more like a toolkit which helps you to accomplish tasks. It never does the job for you. Librarys should do it. And that is the point where I can see improvements. At this time you have to google libs to fit your needs. What would be the codeigniter way of downloading external libs? Maybe a section on the page with categories and a list of libs in that category with a brief description and some redditstyle up/downvotes to see that this lib is active and trusted by ppls etc. and then a link to the github page, where the user can download the lib. That would be a way to see what CodeIgniter is really capable of. But these are just first ideas. 

All in one can't say how much I love this framework. But sure at some time I will learn some laravel and revisit symphony after that. But not to stick with one framework. More like getting a feel for which framework fills the requirements for the job.

Cheers to the CodeIgniter devs and to everyone who is envolved in CodeIgniter. You did a GREAT job 

You're absolutely right. Just as my signature says, codeigniter is just a toolkit. The debate really is what should be included in this basic toolkit.

Codeigniter is simply one of the tools you need to learn to be a successful developer. Always add more tools to your coding arsenal!