In one of his latest blog entries, Justin has posted an article from Aaron Crane that talks about using PHP in large websites - some of the issues, methods, and suggestions that he's noticed over time.

The PHP scripting language has an enjoyed an enormous growth in popularity over the past few years. It benefits from being particularly easy to pick up, and from having been designed as a language specifically for producing webpages. This means that choosing PHP as your implementation language allows you to build a dynamically-generated webpage quickly and easily.

However, it is not clear how well PHP scales for use in larger commercial websites. This paper examines the issues in trying to do so.

He invesigates topics like:

• Separation of presentation from business logic
• Areas where PHP's initial simplicity can actually make things more complicated
• Using a team of developers to build a site

For each item, he looks in detail about what the topic is and how a manage/develoeper can get a handle on it. There are good and bad sides to all, but finding the right balance is key.