[jordanlev]

I totally agree with you about the difference between the Ruby and PHP communities. But I think when you say "the best hope for PHP...", you might be forgetting that not every project using PHP is a big application. I think Rails would be overkill for a smaller project (for example, an informational website for a small business), and so would Symfony (which the author of the linked article says himself). I bet a majority of the usage of PHP out there is for much smaller tasks that might benefit a little bit from a framework (or at least a separation of concerns), but would not be worth switching to a different language and platform (not to mention the deployment piece of the puzzle).