I'd take issue with arguing that there isn't much innovation in the PHP community.
It might not be the best language for every application (I find myself using it less and less these days), but there have been a whole ton of recent developments that have made it much nicer to work with.
PHP 5.4 made some pretty significant improvements, and Laravel is one of the nicest full-stack frameworks I've ever worked with. PHP now has good/sane dependency management via Composer, and many of Laravel and Symfony's components can now be used outside of the main framework. Microframeworks are a pleasure to work with in PHP, which is especially nice for smaller one-off webapps.
Many of the recent improvements have been (very) late to the game, but they're nevertheless welcome. I could do without the Java-esque levels of verbosity that PSR-0 encourages, but it does seem to result in highly-maintainable code.
"New PHP" projects (written from scratch, targeting 5.3 and above) tend to be of surprisingly high quality. As I've mentioned before, Laravel emerged from nowhere as a lightweight and very high-quality framework, long after the PHP community had been declared moribund.
It might not be the best language for every application (I find myself using it less and less these days), but there have been a whole ton of recent developments that have made it much nicer to work with.
PHP 5.4 made some pretty significant improvements, and Laravel is one of the nicest full-stack frameworks I've ever worked with. PHP now has good/sane dependency management via Composer, and many of Laravel and Symfony's components can now be used outside of the main framework. Microframeworks are a pleasure to work with in PHP, which is especially nice for smaller one-off webapps.
Many of the recent improvements have been (very) late to the game, but they're nevertheless welcome. I could do without the Java-esque levels of verbosity that PSR-0 encourages, but it does seem to result in highly-maintainable code.
"New PHP" projects (written from scratch, targeting 5.3 and above) tend to be of surprisingly high quality. As I've mentioned before, Laravel emerged from nowhere as a lightweight and very high-quality framework, long after the PHP community had been declared moribund.