PHP is undeniably a top choice as a Website building language.PHP offers many advantages; it is fast, stable, secure, easy to use and open source (free)

PHP is one of the most widely used language for creating dynamics websites and applications. PHP frameworks like Zend, CakePHP, CodeIgniter, etc and open source PHP classes & libraries have made our lives significantly easy.

Some of the most influential and popular open source CMS/Publishing platforms like WordPress, Joomla and Drupal all rely on PHP and many others do to.
Unix-based Web hosts offer PHP as an included option with hosting accounts

Whether you are a PHP novice or an experienced developer; tools that you use have direct impact on your productivity. W3Avenue has compiled a list of really useful extensions & tools for PHP developers that will help you speed up development and significantly improve overall quality of your code.

www.php.net
www.onlamp.com/php/
www.phpbuilder.com

You can't build a world-class Website without a good development environment. In the case of PHP, the development environment must be particularly capable; a PHP programmer will rarely be programming only in PHP. PHP is necessarily entwined with HTML and JavaScript on the front end and with SQL on the back end. Consequently, a good PHP IDE must allow the developer to work with equal ease in multiple languages (both programming and markup) and contexts.