Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and if one considers that PHP started as a templating language and has evolved in what it is to-day the 'awfulness' goes aw

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and if one considers that PHP started as a templating language and has evolved in what it is to-day the 'awfulness' goes away. For a person with C# background it offers the advantage of extending the language if you need to. For IDE I use Netbeans. For frameworks I use CodeIgniter and CakePHP. For ORM I use Doctrine. For CMS I use Drupal. For one two night projects I use Wordpress. There is so much in PHP in the web that it would be hard to keep yourself from re-discovering the wheel!