It has come a long way. My last job was at a big PHP shop, which had a heavy focus on doing PHP The Right Way. The result was a fairly decent, maintainable codebase. I came to really appreciate the flexibility and ability to just "make things work" that PHP has, while finally having a proper development environment with real dependency management and IDE support.
Do you have any pointers to the recommended Right Way to do modern PHP? I'd be interested to explore it; I have a number of places where I want to add tiny bits of interactivity to otherwise static web pages, and this totally seems to be what PHP does best.
http://phptherightway.com is a good place to start, if you haven't read it before. It's opinionated, and not necessarily a guide follow down to the letter, but it can put you on the right track.
Ha ha --- I should have thought to search for that!
It seems to be a bit light on advice in places. e.g. the section on comparison operators lightly mentions the difference between == and === but doesn't say anything about when they should be used. As that's one of the traditional PHP gotchas I would have expected more there.
I think PHPStorm from JetBrains is the IDE of choice of most PHP devs using IDEs at this point. They completely own the market, and rightfully so (I'm still stuck on Sublime Text myself, but wouldn't consider any other IDE than PHPStorm if I were to use one).
