Is the software any less useful because it's not created in a trendy language?
One of the advantages that PHP has is that virtually any cheap web-host in the world can run it. It's not a bad choice to sell a self-hosted product in PHP because of this advantage.
I'm not a huge fan of PHP for many types of projects, but I don't see how it benefits anybody to reflexively hate on something just because of a technology choice.
PHP was such a security nightmare for so long that I am very reluctant to enable it on any box I actually care about. (It could well be better. It's been a long time since I was sysadmining many boxes.) So for a project I have to do the hosting on, language choice still matters to me.
I've worked in RoR, but calling me a huge fan would be a stretch. I have a number of substantial issues with it.
Maybe it's just what I've happened to see, but my impression is th I certainly had to do a lot more upgradingat the PHP platform security issues were more frequent and more substantial than RoR has been. I certainly had to do a lot more upgrading. Maybe it's different these days.
But the major difference I've seen up close is that RoR makes it much easier for average programmers to be productive while still coding securely. If I'm going to be running J. Random Hacker's code on a personal server, I'm going to worry less with Rails.
All that said, I'd also be reluctant to install a Rails app. Just less reluctant than PHP.
PHP and MySQL aren't that bad (and support for them is pretty much guaranteed on every web host).
However, the fact that it supports PHP 4.2 and MySQL 3.23 makes me wonder how old the code base is! Makes me think it's using so many obsolete PHP methods, the deprecated MySQL extension, and is all procedural code (which almost always seems to be spaghetti code with PHP).
