I'm a big fan of Yii, and I use it a lot in my own projects. (The fact that it has an nigh-direct clone of Rail's ActiveRecord helps.)

It does, however, have the same problem that a lot of other PHP frameworks have in that, unless you're really careful, your components are "trapped" because of the Yii idioms and base classes.

I think Mr Spatula's point stands. Code reusability in PHP is nothing like what it is in the Ruby world.

I find it interesting that the positive things I hear about PHP frameworks are in reference to features influenced by RoR.

That's probably only true because you hear about it here, which is a very self-selective group, who tend to lean towards Ruby, Python and the "popular" trends. In the PHP community being like ruby, or rails is not necessarily a plus and can in fact may be a negative depending on what you're trying to accomplish.

Frankly I'm sick of articles such as these, as if the author is pleading with this selective community that it's OK to use PHP. Somewhat sickening. They should feel confident in the tools they use without having to justify it to anybody.

Active Record (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_record_pattern) is an architectural pattern and not something born in RoR. The parent just happened to mention an implementation (for which there are many in PHP) copied from RoR.

I'm curious, what other RoR influenced PHP framework features have you heard of?

The pattern is good. It's the extras on top of what the pattern proscribes, though, that makes Rails' implementation great, eg. composition via behaviors, easy validation and relations, and scoping for bundling sets of common query criteria.

PHP implementations run the gamut from basic low-hanging-fruit-grabbing attempts (like CodeIgniter's frankly, well, weird implementation) to fully-featured ones like Yii. I do agree that they goes as far as doing most of RoR's implementation and then just... stop.

> ... what other RoR influenced PHP framework features have you heard of?

RoR-like routing shows up frequently as well, and in Yii's case, Views templates have the same access to both directly-assigned template variables, and variables belonging to the controller instance itself.