PHP is still my go to for anything web-page based that's not a single page app. It's just a really nice solution for protoyping and making web quickly. I mean,

PHP is still my go to for anything web-page based that's not a single page app. It's just a really nice solution for protoyping and making web quickly. I mean, custom stuff, not wordpress. A lot of my successful projects have been rewritten later in nodejs. But for getting something up and running to test a concept, PHP is great if you're comfortable with its idiosyncracies. I'd say Python is just as idiosyncratic, and its packaging system is just too much of a pain point. And Node doesn't ship with mature database interfaces, its dependencies are scary, there's more concern about runaway scripts, crashes are harder to recover from, and a lot of times all you really want from a router is to serve your file structure with some access rules. I think PHP is still the best choice for prototyping dynamic HTML and logic fast, without any packages or plug-ins. A lotta times I still even use it for short CLI scripts and cron tasks that do database ops.