CodeIgniter is a very entry level framework. You get up and running quickly but by the time you're halfway through building your site it starts to annoy the hell out of you. Go with Kohana (version 3) instead. Its quite easy to get up and running with, isn't bloated and comes with a very good ORM (ActiveRecord based) that takes care of 95% of the CRUD functionality.
True. However, if you take a moment to look at the actual framework code it's pretty self explanatory. Nowadays my first port of call is the framework source before I Google or search anywhere else.
