Plain PHP without frameworks is indeed a good choice in the same ball park as plain CGI. And on the plus side it scales to bigger things thanks to FastCGI with

Plain PHP without frameworks is indeed a good choice in the same ball park as plain CGI. And on the plus side it scales to bigger things thanks to FastCGI with for instance nginx. At work, every new team member get the task to add their profile to our team rooster. Works great thanks to the low barriers of changing a single PHP file and the low risk of breaking the whole web page is great especially for juniors.