I made a ton of progress week before last and did not stop to do updates here like I should have done.  I made some changes to the doctrine entities and my db schema, which I think I have well in hand.  The big thing I'm trying to do now is to figure out Association Mapping (like sql join), and I've posted here and here about it, hoping for some advice or a breakthrough.

Doctrine and CI make it incredibly easy to write code, and fast.  More soon, hopefully.