Learn your OOP, algorithms, and your programming. Then decide, learn Ruby first then decide. Most of these answers are one liners and you shouldn't base your decision on that. Most frustration and trouble people get with PHP/Ruby/RoR is that they haven't learned the fundamentals and "it's crap!" because you can't figure something out because you don't have the fundamentals of it down. If you are particular to a framework you're always going to turn a blind eye to some feature that you don't agree with. That is going to be true for anything you get your hands on.
With that being said and I being a PHP developer and have been learning Ruby/RoR for a few months(obsessively). I like the elegance of a lot of the solutions and tricks. And the general mindset of the community. Any book, tutorial, or screencast I pickup always mentions best practices and how to make your code clean, lean, refactor and extendable. This is done to a point that I feel safe in assuming that is the overall mindset.
It's not an easy decision, but you shouldn't have to make it. Don't think of it as a "ditch". You're keeping your knowledge of programming. That should be emphasized, you're applying this knowledge to a new area, hopefully learning more, which can in turn be applied to PHP helping you better your craft.
With that being said and I being a PHP developer and have been learning Ruby/RoR for a few months(obsessively). I like the elegance of a lot of the solutions and tricks. And the general mindset of the community. Any book, tutorial, or screencast I pickup always mentions best practices and how to make your code clean, lean, refactor and extendable. This is done to a point that I feel safe in assuming that is the overall mindset.
It's not an easy decision, but you shouldn't have to make it. Don't think of it as a "ditch". You're keeping your knowledge of programming. That should be emphasized, you're applying this knowledge to a new area, hopefully learning more, which can in turn be applied to PHP helping you better your craft.