Ruby on Rails
I've not done PHP in a long while, since my last hand coded site that was operating back in 2006/early 2007. While it was a worthwhile experience, and for my needs it worked well, I think I need to move onto a more web 2.0 style of web development.
I just used a term which no one really knows what it means. Marketing buzz-word? Definitely. Anyhow, the general gist is that a more sophisticated paradigm should be used (oops, another marketing buzzword) for future developments.
Drupal, which runs the site currently is excellent and I have no problem with it. This stuff will just be for my own benefit, getting to grips with using a more robust system. One of the concepts which is generally new to me is MVC, Model-View-Controller. I've heard of it, but never used it since all my code was application specific tying the data and GUI implementation together into one.
To use the MVC design pattern, I thought about using Zend Framework or Ruby on Rails. Zend Framework is a PHP framework designed to allow building of MVC structured web applications. Ruby on Rails is a similar thing, but instead uses the Ruby scripting language and has a radically different approach than PHP/Zend. I'll probably end up learning both, but for now I'm going to dive into something new and discover the wonders of Ruby and Rails.