[pavel_lishin]

I haven't worked with many other languages, but in my experience, most PHP projects are a tangled mess that are hard enough to figure out when you're an expert, much less a novice. I would recommend a language with a better user-base, and one less susceptible to newbies building big projects. I'd wager that given any 100 PHP projects vs any 100 Rails projects, the rails projects would be easier to read and understand.

[eavc]

Does that mean you'd recommend Rails for me based on my criteria?

[Groxx]

I would actually recommend against Rails, unless you have a fair amount of programming experience already. I really like it, and Ruby is a wonderful language, but it's extraordinarily complex. It'll get you from zero to something very very quickly, but the "magic" behind the scenes will inevitably bite you, and the solutions can be difficult to grasp. It's also a very quickly changing framework, so you will have to watch out if you change versions, even fairly minor ones.

If you take your time with it, it can work, and there are a fair number of very good guides for it. But be willing to take the time you need to really understand what's going on.

[pavel_lishin]

I don't have enough experience with Rails, tbh - this is less of a recommendation and more of a warning that you may grow to despite PHP, programming, and life itself if you inherit a bad set of projects.