Heresy! j/k. I'm actually curious why you switched from python to php. Was it your choice or forced upon you? If your choice, can you explain? I usually meet people going the other direction.
Well, I was running a small business at the time, supporting other small businesses and small sites. Virtually all of the ones I hadn't written were using PHP, so as I fixed problems and added features I found that I was building a library of PHP even though I built all "my software" in Python, Common Lisp, and a few other one offs. As I contemplated getting out of the business, it dawned on me that it was going to be terribly difficult and expensive for all these small businesses to find someone to support and extend the apps written in various languages I'd used, and there wasn't anything really novel or language-dependent in the CRUD apps I was writing (mostly because my clients were almost all mainly focused on the look of the site and graphics, which was all handled outside the main code via templating, and which I didn't do myself). So I began to write new things in PHP with an eye to divesting myself of the client base and getting a "real job", as my friends and parents would say. This led, in a very straightforward manner, to my getting PHP positions when I folded the business and moved to the DC area, last year. This turns out to have been fortuitous, since PHP and Java are the main languages represented in web development, at least around here.
Perhaps that was a longer answer than you wanted. :)
Perhaps that was a longer answer than you wanted. :)