[eluser]Kevin Smith[/eluser]
So I've been using and really impressed with ExpressionEngine for about a year now, and I'm eagerly awaiting the new version built on CI!
I'm considering my first foray into CI because of a sudden project. A potential client that we met with back in the Spring has suddenly reappeared and is ready to go. Great! But he's fine-tuned his request, and where I was going to originally try to hack out a solution in EE or Drupal, I've decided that the best thing would probably be a custom rolled solution. Now, I know this will be much more time-intensive, but I think in the long run it'll work the best. (But I'm totally open to criticism and suggestion, so feel free to let me have it!)
I'm familiar with PHP in that I can read, troubleshoot, and modify PHP, but I'm not fluent yet. Never really had a reason to need it. But we're seeing our two-man company's workload shift, and the writing on the wall tells me to start getting deeper into programming with something like PHP. I've heard that CodeIgniter is brilliant for beginners, and in taking my own look, it appears to make perfect sense to me. I'm just worried that CI might not be powerful enough to handle my ultimate task, so that's where you guys come in. Help me out here. Is it reasonable to expect that by January I can build a tiered membership site with contests, judges, groups and content that is localized yet available for all to see (aka The Nashville Songwriters' Group) along with an affiliate program? And is CI the framework to use? What about Symfony or any of the other PHP frameworks? (And for extra fun, Ruby on Rails? And no, I don't know Ruby at all.)
