[aregsar]

I would take a look at Laravel which is php on rails with less magic and more built in features such as authentication and background jobs. The most important thing is that its community is growing rapidly and it has a BDFL ala DHH in Taylor's Orwell. Also there are really good fresh resources such as latacasts Codecourse and the Laracon conferences

[acomjean]

I still like php for web development, although it seems to be falling out of favor somewhat. The new version 7 is quite fast, and its quick to get up and running. I've not used Laravel, (I use a lighter framework called Silex) but it is PHP's version of Rails.

I've found php is somewhat slightly more verbose and fewer data structures seems to make php code easier to maintain for other people than perl and java (which I also maintain...).

[busterarm]

Having had to learn PHP to work on some WordPress stuff, I can honestly say that I find PHP 5.6 and onward to be a competent, usable language. It has its quirks, but so does JavaScript. In fact, I'd say PHP and JavaScript are now close cousins. The array methods are a bit annoying, but you can definitely write effective, clean code in modern PHP.