[eluser]ICEcoffee[/eluser]
I started coding in the early 80's on my Sinclair ZX81 the on to a Sinclair QL, where I started to do my first bits of serious coding, on what was then, a powerful personal computer. I went into the IT industry not as a programmer but an IBM main frame (sys370's) operator.
For the last 5 years or so, I have been running my own web development company, using Dreamweaver and other 'industry standard' applications. But even as Dreamweaver became more competent in version 8 and CS2, I was always running into things that seemed unnecessarily restrictive.
Just lately I have spent a lot of time with two popular open-source CMSes, Joomla and Drupal. Drupal seems very powerful, but both are very restrictive. I was coming across sittuations that seemed so difficult to achieve, yet in straight forward HTML/CSS/PHP/MySQL, I could have done the same thing in 15 minutes, and when you come across this situation often, wasted time adds up.
Then I started to look at the various frameworks that around, in order to search for more power and yet have more freedom, was there such a thing? You bet, I looked at 3 popular PHP frameworks and opted to try Codeigniter. It didn't take long before I found the freedom I was looking for, POWER and FREEDOM, fantastic. Codeigniter REALLY has re-ignighted my passion for coding, and I'm gonna build my first site with it soon. Thanks Codeigniter developers.