Ruby on Rails would be a good system to learn (but make sure you really understand what's going on over on the database side of things; it's easy to do stupid s

Ruby on Rails would be a good system to learn (but make sure you really understand what's going on over on the database side of things; it's easy to do stupid stuff with Rails if you aren't paying attention). Ruby on Rails also appears to be perhaps the most mainstream option right now. PHP as a language has never appealed to me, but it has the advantage of, it's very easy for novices to install PHP applications on their server. Consider Wordpress. If Wordpress were in Ruby on Rails, it probably would be nowhere near as widespread, because it takes more effort to get it running. Wordpress is pretty much, plop the files on your server and it's running.