You're going to need to learn about color temperature (in Kelvin ratings
usually, rather than what's called CRI--color rendering index, though that may be usable information) so that you can have the right type of light over the plants, depending on what phase of growth they're in. Along with this you'll need to understand how lumens and light output works so that you can give your babies the best, most efficient lighting to make them grow and bud, without overheating them. With CFLs you're going to need lots of lights, in large part because of light penetration issues.
Briefly, besides brightness (usually expressed as lumens), color temperature is a way for us to tell how closely the light quality (wavelength and/or spectra) match sunlight. During vegetative phase growth, you usually want a bluer light, as expressed in Kelvin this would be about 5,000K-6,500K (sunlight, at noon, is 5,500 Kelvin). During flowering you want to give them a warmer light, light with stronger peaks towards the red end of the spectrum to mimic fall sunlight conditions. This is expressed in Kelvin by a lower number.
The numbers I see thrown around for CFL lighting are 6,500K & 2,700K (just as applicable to high intensity discharge lighting), the former for veg the latter for flowering.
That was NOT in short, but I hope it was in brief. There's a whole section dedicated to CFL growing, ye needs reading in there.
