2)Within the past 6 months I had a wordpress install, which was up-to-date used in a DOS attack against someone else. PHP also does some surprising type changes

2)Within the past 6 months I had a wordpress install, which was up-to-date used in a DOS attack against someone else. PHP also does some surprising type changes that can be exploited. That plus people remembering the mysql_real_escape crap leaves people with a poor impression of PHP security. 3) It's definitely much better but still doesn't compare to the ruby or node communities. I think the biggest changes to the community will be a bigger focus on testing/TDD and facebook's HHVM 5)True. Wordpress and Joomla are extremely old applications. However Wordpress is still extremely popular, which is why I bring it up. 7) Would you mind adding what your experience has been? I'm genuinely interested. Ruby really only has 2 main frameworks: Rails and Sinatra. Python and Node are more fractured, but there are generally a few main frameworks