[oliwarner]

"Frameworks" are definitely the word to describe what has changed since you left us and you've certainly mentioned a few, but the way websites are pieced together is largely the same. A bit of dynamic code sharts out some HTML and that gets rendered with some CSS (and occasionally some JS).

I'd leave the backend stuff well alone to start if I were you. If the last browsers you were testing against were really Netscape and IE4, I'd strongly suggest you start with the design side of things. Bootstrap is a great framework for writing little CSS and reaping a many-device-compatible site. There are alternatives like Materialize.

So build a one-page static website and see how that all fits together. Change the design. Consider digging into the CSS (or LESS/SASS CSS-generator languages). You can do a lot with static sites. There are even form-handling third parties to take out the hard stuff.

Once you're on top of that, you're in a good spot to go dynamic; learn database modelling, templating, URL dispatchers and all the jazz that is specific to the backend framework of your choice.

Don't feel pressurised to stay with PHP. You haven't used it in years and I'd argue it's everybody's favourite punch-bag for a reason. The quality of tutorials is much better these days so picking up something like Django or Rails without prior Python or Ruby experience is easy. But don't try to master them all at once.

The best way to learn is to dig in and build.