Is CodeIgniter Right for me?

[eluser]Mike Stecker[/eluser]
I am working on building a site as a side project in hopes of creating some side income and to learn more coding. I'm not a great coder (barely know anything about PHP), but I know ExpressionEngine pretty well, good enough to be able to build most of what I want to create (with the help of lots of extensions and addons). But I can't help but wonder if I shouldn't be using EE and should be writing this entire site completely custom with PHP.

Can anyone provide me with input on what you think I should be doing? I don't want to give too much away, but it would be a sort of mashup of Facebook/Meetup/Yelp/etc...

I'm getting the site done currently and it works, but I'm wondering how EE will handle traffic, etc of a site like this and wondering if it might be better off built with some other solution instead.

Thanks in advance

[eluser]Mike Stecker[/eluser]
*bump*

[eluser]pmoroom[/eluser]
[quote author="mstecker" date="1309486307"]*bump*[/quote]

Maybe we are not getting the question. You want us to tell you what you should be doing to earn income?

[eluser]Mike Stecker[/eluser]
[quote author="pmoroom" date="1309653796"]Maybe we are not getting the question. You want us to tell you what you should be doing to earn income?[/quote]


No, not at all! I was asking, based off the brief description of what I wanted to do above, is it more effective for me to learn and develop my site in CodeIgniter or should I just stick with ExpressionEngine?

[eluser]IgnitedCoder[/eluser]
ExpressionEngine is good for what it does and you could of course build out your product with it... That said. Make a list of the features you have for your project, nothing complex just make a list, then match each feature to a addon EE can provide. Once you've done that consider and think about whether you like to know whats inside the black box.

Most EE addons IMO are a black box and since I prefer to know exactly whats going on in my code I tend to steer clear of EE projects unless a clients requests it. However EE is built on CI so that might be moot at this point. Bottom line is you could build it with EE if you wanted to but you have to figure out how much control you would like to have over function vs form.

EE is a pre-built CMS and that means pre-defined rules whereas CI allows you a greater freedom to experiment. CI also means more libraries from the community many of which you can alter to fit your needs. Find sites that boast millions of hits running EE and ask them what they did, how they setup their environment etc. Checkout ShopIgniter its on of the biggest CI projects I've seen.

Hope this helps some.