PHP is big because 10 years ago, it was the best choice. Back then, the non-microsoft options were Perl, ColdFusion, Java, and PHP. PHP was the best for web development out of that.
This isn't the case anymore. PHP has been far surpassed by Python and Ruby.
PHP is a wonderful templating language.
Where does my opinion come from? I switch us from PHP to Python after writing a large CMS in PHP.
I've written "large" systems in PHP and some things annoy me, but I imagine this is true with other languages too (I hear from Ruby and Python devs all the time, some things get annoying).
That said, I spend most of my time on the web writing templates, and PHP is amazing at making that easier. There's a good reason PHP is used in ~78% of all web sites -- most of them are basic blogs or content sites.
Most web development is just templating attached to a business model layer, so why not use a language ideal for templating?
This isn't the case anymore. PHP has been far surpassed by Python and Ruby.
PHP is a wonderful templating language.
Where does my opinion come from? I switch us from PHP to Python after writing a large CMS in PHP.