I didn’t abandon the rewrite IDEA, though. I just asked myself one important question:

“Is there anything Rails can do, that PHP CAN’T do?”

The answer is no.

I threw away 2 years of Rails code, and opened a new empty Subversion repository.

It’s the most beautiful PHP I’ve ever written, all wonderfully MVC and DRY, and and I owe it all to Rails.

Inspired by Rails:

*- all logic is coming from the models, one per database table, like Martin Fowler’s Active Record pattern.

*- no requires or includes needed, thanks to [url;=http://www.php.net/autoload]__autoload[/url].

*- real MVC separation: controllers have no HTML or business-logic, and only use REST-approved HTTP. (GET is only get. Any destructive actions require POST.)

*- all HTML coming from a cute and powerful templating system I whipped up in 80 lines, all multi-lingual and caching and everything

*- … and much more. In only 12,000 lines of code, including HTML templates. (Down from 90,000, before.)