For the past few weeks, we've been quietly working on a plan to create the next iteration of our product line - making it more user friendly (yes - we've been listening to you), easier to set up and much less complicated without losing the flexibility that we hold so close to our hearts.
However, to make these changes, it was quickly determined that we would need to update our site framework. Though our home-grown PHP based system served its purpose for the first version, as the development team grows and the complexity increases, it really was time to move to a more robust framework that could provide the sort of flexibility and hooks that we need to really make the next version of our product something special.
We considered a number of options. The two that seemed to resonate the most were Ruby on Rails, which is pretty much considered the standard for building robust Web 2.0 (yeah, I hate that term too) applications and CakePHP, which had the benefit of being PHP based - a language that most of the team was already used to working with.
Long story short, we ended up choosing Ruby on Rails. Why? It's open source, there's a large development community built around it and even though there's a bit of a learning curve for us old PHP hacks, we can already see that development time will be much faster once we have the relaunch completed.