I'm a relatively new convert. Only in the last year to 18 months.
My work in the past has been mainly using Drupal and a bit or WordPress and Joomla. While Drupal serves most of my needs, I've been increasingly frustrated by the bloat. Most projects take up at 50-100meg and use a more system resources than I'd like. Page sizes have been another issue for me. Large multiple CSS files in particular have been a bugbear for me. I can't find any useful way to trim them down. I wanted lean.
I experimented with some Ruby apps like LocomotiveCMS which I quite liked. I like the speed, especailly when combine with a nosql databse like Mongodb, but deploying it to shared host is a pain.
I went back to PHP & tried Symfony, Laravel & CodeIngiter. Symfony seamed large for what I wanted. I know all the "cool kids" seem to be using Laravel but I found it a bit fussy to set up.
CodeIgniter feels like home to me. I like its small footprint. It seems to run on minimal resources. It is easy to set up. A simple download, set up a database & edit the config files. It is a breeze to deploy to a shared host. I can do pretty much what I like with it.
I've got a couple of projects I'm using it for. I'm converting a Drupal site to CodeIgniter. The CI version is lean and fast. I'm also woking on a history project for a local history group on World War One. I've set up the MVC. It displays the data nicely. My next job is to write the back end
