"And there is more sharing of knowledge and experience (and code) going on inside the PHP-community then any other developer community I know."
There's somebody I'd like you to meet: http://perlmonks.org
The only thing that's really good about PHP is the easy deployment. You just upload your files to your server and it works. The language is very crappy, so this easy deployment only outweighs the extra development effort up to a point. I'd recommend against it for sites that take more than two days of work. With services like Heroku, deployment with Rails may have become as easy as deployment with PHP.
But I use it for anything web-based because it gives me guaranteed results, anytime, anywhere, on whatever scale on whatever budget. I just wouldn't use it for sites with complex business logic, but let's face it, most websites, even the big ones, are hardly rocket-science in that respect.
What I love most is the dynamic of the PHP community. For instance, when RoR arrived on the scene, the response wasn't to dis RoR or run scared, but more like "that's so cool, let's see if we can bring PHP to that level". And there is more sharing of knowledge and experience (and code) going on inside the PHP-community then any other developer community I know.
More then any development platform I know, PHP is alive and constantly developing, but still as easy to deploy and easy to learn as ever.