My web work these days are personal projects, volunteer work, or small freelance projects; so I am answering from that perspective.<p>For paid work, generally I stick to what I know -- a LAMP stack and whatever MVC/CMS framework fits the job.<p>My personal side projects are where I push borders and try to research new solutions. These side projects give me the breadth of knowledge to then be able to say, "hey, X technology will work really well" for work that is more important.<p>If you're asking for opinions on technologies and frameworks --<p>- I did a survey of php frameworks a few years ago and arrived at Kohana. It met my criteria of (1) a lightweight MVC framework, (2) code that is clean/easy to work with (aka not too much "voodoo" going on), (3) useful library of utilities (pagination, etc.), and (4) very configurable URL routing/validation. Developed one small and one medium sized kohana web apps since then and it is a pleasure to work with.<p>- When I was still doing web work under salary, we used an internal Zend-like framework which was forced upon all devs. The learning curve was high, it was very convoluted, and kept getting in my way of trying to develop my application. After I got used to the way it worked, it was more bearable, but I wouldn't go back there again. You'd have to modify dozens of files to make the simplest of changes.<p>- Very rarely do I write my own libraries or frameworks. There's almost always someone else out there who has already solved at least part of your problem.<p>- For simple CMS websites, I use wordpress. I started using wp back when textpattern was still a thing and haven't found any compelling CMS alternatives in php. It does seem to have gotten bloated in recent years. I tried Joomla once and decided I wouldn't go there again. It's very confusing, bloated, and the administration pages are unintuitive.<p>I'm open to suggestions for alternatives!