Just General Questions

1) I want to develop as site very similar to clashcaller.com . . . Is this up the alley of CodeIgniter, or something else?

Sure, Codeigniter is fine for a site like clashcaller.com. It's fine for even more complex sites.

2) Am I misunderstanding the concept of CodeIgniter? Is it to make it easier for PHP development, or add on to the project?

The purpose of Codeigniter is indeed to make PHP development easier. It gives you an organized way to do things. Someone else said that if you didn't know about OOP, that Codeigniter was not for you, but I have to disagree. The amount of OOP you need to know is not much and easy to learn.

I don't think Codeigniter would be very successful as an addon to another project, if you mean something like half Wordpress and half Codeigniter.

I think the basic thing about Codeigniter is this. It takes your URLs and what to execute. So if you have a URL like http://www.example.com/character/generate/knight, Codeigniter is going to look for for the file character.php in your controller directory, and execute the generate function in that file after passing it the argument "knight." Your generate function then builds a character of the Knight class. To do that without Codeigniter (or some framework) would take a lot of coding.

Hey, don't work without a PHP debugger. Several free IDEs have this features built in. Two are NetBeans and CodeLobster. Without a debugger, it's like you're driving with a blindfold on -- you are going to crash!