Or Python. - Cristo

Could have been worse. They could have been written in Perl. - Chris, Taskerrific Guy

The language of choice is just a tool. What's important is the final result (even if it's in assembly ;)). - Emil Kirichev

Wait, what? PHP is old now? Damn, languages are falling out of use quicker than I can learn 'em. - Slippy "Threadsbane" Lane

Is there a concrete benefit to why they'd be written in Rails and not PHP besides PHP is not as new or cool as Rails? - Mark Trapp

actually PHP is a programing language but rails is a framework. framework can not be as powerful as a programing language. there are a few similar rails like framework for PHP such as cakephp and symfony - امیرعباس

Probably only if you're really into object-oriented programming. Ruby was built from the ground-up to be object-oriented. PHP, like Perl, had it grafted on. - Victor Ganata

Too bad the works of Shakespeare are written in Early Modern English. So much potential for a re-write there. - Micah Wittman

Yeah, because Drupal is like Shakespeare. - Cristo

Exactly. And Joomla is like Christopher Marlowe. - Micah Wittman

Hmmm... PHP is to Rails as Bacon is to Cow. PHP == Ruby == Python == Perl ==.... One problem I see with using a framework like Rails, Django, Symfony, Catalyst, etc, is that developers are constrained by the box presented by the framework. Get outside the box and *boom* you probably just forked the framework, and you might as well go fully custom anyway, which is where we started from... If you want some framework based CMSs though: http://django-cms.org/, http://www.sympalphp.org/, http://radiantcms.org/demo/, and http://code.google.com/p... (Disclosure: I am a huge fan of Django. There. I said it. Problem admitted, step 1 complete.) - Andy Bold

Zope and Plone -- built on Python -- have been around for years and have yet to catch on fire. The coolness of the underlying language has little bearing on the success of the product. (Which pains me, because I'm fond of Python. And Zope and Plone.) - Fred Yankowski

This deserved a blog post, with a fitting title: A thought on Ignorance http://short.ie/0mt8af - Che Hodgins

Che, that was insightful. You might want to avoid using the word ignorance so easily. - Cristo

I don't know, are frameworks really that constraining? What prevents you from using plain Ruby in your Rails app, or plain Perl in your Catalyst app? In terms of functionality, sure, the language shouldn't matter so long as it's Turing-complete. But you've got to admit, some languages are much uglier than others. But even this doesn't really matter unless you actually intend to modify the code. - Victor Ganata

Cristo, thanks for advice.. I know what you mean. :) - Che Hodgins

Ruby on Rails and PHP are completely different things. I perfer Joomla over Drupal but looking at current framework cms systems which there are some out there - ruby on rails is a framework incase you don't know ;) - then they suck in comparison to a programming language cms (php based etc) such as Joomla and Drupal. - Nicholas James

Yahoo! runs on PHP for the most part. We would probably have to quadruple the amount of hardware we use if we moved to Rails because of the performance problems of Ruby. - Glen Campbell, B.A.

You're using Python right now. - Cristo

Rails is new? My I thought interest in rails had peaked and was already fading. - Henry Holtzman

I dare you to write a Drupal clone for Rails and get it to scale as well as it does on PHP :) I'm not saying that Rails isn't capable or not awesome in it's own right, but I believe that for massive sites (which Drupal/PHP handles quite well) Rails won't be as effective. - Mo Kargas

I know a year ago Twitter was supposedly abandoning Rails precisely because of the scaling issues and planning to use a different language and framework. Did this end up happening? - Victor Ganata

I agree the language isn't as important as the end result, look at Facebook chat powered with Erlang. Erlang really that's not a sexy language, but it made a sexy app. - Justin Yost

Any votes for Django? - Inside Alaska

Django? Hell yeah! :) - Andy Bold from email

I love the houses of parliament but too bad they are not made of glass and steel right? - Ben

having been trained in OOP using Java, PHP seems quite comfortable to me! but i agree that the language is less important than what is built with it, so whatever people prefer to code in, they should be encouraged :) - Mike Chelen

Are Rails programing primitives really as durable and scalable as PHP has proven to be? - James Watters

The thing I hate about Drupal is the way that the PHP templates intermingle code and presentation. I'd really like to see a CMS built in Grails (I'm a Java programmer) that has a really clean MVC separation. - Peter Kelley

Peter, since you mentioned Grails, you may be interested in this podcast: http://www.webdevradio.com/ - Grails gets a lot of air time there. Cheers! - Micah Wittman

Reimplementing the exact functionality of an existing CMS just to write it in another language does seem kind of a waste, although I guess it would be a great way to learn a new language. Does Rails still not scale well despite swallowing up Merb? - Victor Ganata

Wow, there's a lot of misinformation in this thread on all sides... suffice to say you should evaluate your options thoroughly and choose the language that lets you be most productive. With the hardware available today most projects will never hit scaling barriers on the web side. Pay a LOT of attention to the database software and design though, because that's where the bottlenecks will come from. - jakebf