Is php worth it?

[eluser]t'mo[/eluser]
It depends. What are you building? Web "sites"? Or web "applications"? (And I'm not saying you can't build a site with Rails and you can't build an app with PHP - you can.)

I've taken several stabs at learning Rails, and am in the process of doing so again. There's quite a learning curve, and quite a lot of "magic" going on under the covers there. I can see a lot of potential for moving quickly once I'm up to speed with Rails, but it's going to take me months to get there.

Step back a couple years. I was in the same boat learning CodeIgniter. But the learning curve wasn't quite so steep; I think I got up that mountain quite nicely by myself. (Well, not exactly by myself; I had this site and google, but I'm finding I get much more traction with Rails when I'm working in person with other developers.)

Overall, I would say Rails offers more potential, but if you're only doing "simple" stuff, PHP/CI is perfectly adequate. In fact, it's quite enjoyable - for what it offers, it's quite powerful and organized. Much better than a giant "index.php" that does everything, or attempting to split up a site's functionality into a bunch of "include"'d files.