While reading on PHP security here on my internship I stumbled on this article on PHP.net: www.php.net/magic_quotes .
They finally decided to remove this features. This will break A lot of websites though when they update to this version.
That’s sad about PHP, they hacked it together but there was no straight line in the development.
Though PHP has some good Frameworks right now, and some great development tools.
A framework I really like is Zend Framework.
And as IDE I use Visual Studio with VS.PHP 
I dislike Zend Studio because it’s built on Eclipse, and thus Java.
It is bad enough to get all the lazy coders that use global variables and write sloppy code to move to v.5 and start encapsulating more, using some OO and implementing better standards. never mind moving to v.6
Hopefullyy the generation that start coding with version 6 will be much neater, no hope for the past though :p
“I dislike Zend Studio because it’s built on Eclipse, and thus Java”
tut tut. Two problems with this statement;
1. I (and the whole engineering team) use Eclipse as our main IDE developing with 1.2 gb of source code for some of the worlds leading commerce software. The IDE is great and “FindBugs” and “CheckStyle” are the must have plugins.
2. If you looked behind the scenes at some of the huge enterprise app servers handling most of the worlds web traffic incuding Search like FAST (http://www.fastsearch.com/) that is now owned by MICROSOFT , and BEA, they are all written in Java
Its not like its “slow” 
If you are coding with .NET then Visual Studio will always be better than any third party app, its a very nice IDE and even I use it when tinkering with C#. Thats the M$haft way.