Hi everyone...
I've actually programmed as a hobby for a long, long time, since back in the days of the TRS-80, when computers were slow and you couldn't do much.
For a long time, I resisted getting into web development beyond basic HTML because I didn't like the stateless nature of the web. But then I started playing an online game, and I developed a battle calculator in PHP to give my team mates an advantage over our opponents. I also set up a few sites with WordPress and customized the themes using not just CSS but also PHP.
After that, I looked for a framework that implemented MVC as lightly as possible. I briefly looked at Symfony, Cake PHP, and Codeigniter, and I went with Codeigniter. I like Codeigniter because it provides a structure that's easy to work within.
But Codeigniter or no, no matter how you use PHP, I seriously recommend you get some way of using XDebug to debug your code. XDebug is (as far as I know) the only debugger for PHP. Some code editors include it or include plugins that support it -- Codelobster and NetBeans include it, and Notepad++ has a plugin for it. No amount of var_dumps can replace the convenience of stepping through your code step by step, watching variables change as you go along.
