OK, I'm one of those interesting people who have started web development with Ruby on Rails and now migrating to PHP. For those who are like me, let me give some advise on this topic.

First of all, the Framework dilemma. PHP has enormous number of frameworks written for it. This is of course much more than what is written on Ruby. And the trouble is, there's no single killer application on PHP like there is Rails for Ruby. So there are frameworks like Symfony, CakePHP, Zend Framework, CodeIgniter ... The list goes on and on. My advise is that research a little and pick one that suits you most without getting into too much detail. In the end I think all frameworks have their advantages and it'll be simpler and more fun when you don't delve into details in the beginning. This way you won't be losing too much time on this, and you can focus on your work. If later you don't like the framework I think you can migrate easily. Although I must add that so far Symfony seems to be greatly influenced by Rails way of doing things, and I really like that. So if you are looking for a framework with Rails philosophy I think Symfony is a safe bet.

Secondly, you won't find many of the nice tools you took for granted while using Rails when you switch to PHP. One of those tools is the interactive ruby shell (irb). This is such a great tool that you can see your code results easily and effortlessly. No need to write a script and add printing statements. Default PHP installation has '-a' switch for interactivity but it is too clumsy. Just try it with 'php -a' and you'll see. Of course there's a solution. You can pick many of the PHP interactive shells written by others. I've just installed php-shell which looks promising. I added the readline module to PHP cli so that it also has command line history. This shell also does code completion. Cool or what :)

This is my thoughts for today. As I come up with different problems (and solutions) I'll be posting them here. Bye for now.