NYCPHP Meetup

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Hello ladies & gentlemen,

I've just purchased my first book on PHP Object-Oriented Programming and
 have also been looking at all the frameworks that abound. I'm unsure of
where to go from here.

To date (and by necessity) most of my projects have been pretty simple
and done in a shared hosting environment--e.g. last year I did my first
Drupal site, I recently rebuilt a custom content management system that
I inherited from someone else & debugged/completed a couple of years
ago, and I've written a maintenance contract expiration tracker for one
of our clients (which works but still needs to be polished)... Actually,
that's pretty much it aside from playing with stuff in my personal sandbox.

Due to my lack of programming experience, I've been doing things in a
less than elegant way and I suspect this is causing me a lot of extra
work, not to mention frustration. I'm loathe to move beyond my current
comfort zone, but I know I MUST if I'm going to make any progress.

Please bear in mind that my primary role is that of graphic/web
designer, therefore I'm unable to devote as much time to my PHP/MySQL
skills as I'd like.

Soooo anyway, I'm looking at the possibility of using a framework that
will work in a shared hosting environment and might help me develop
things faster by not having to re-invent the wheel every time.

Would CodeIgniter fit the bill? I have no idea how to judge which
framework might be best for me, and don't want to waste time learning
one that I'm going to outgrow 12 months from now. Should I even be
thinking about frameworks at this point, or would I be better off
reading through & understanding the OOP book first?

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Regards,
Bev