Arevos

Ruby on Rails is more structured and arguably faster to develop in than straight PHP. Ruby is a more advanced, and somewhat better designed, language than PHP is, and Rails takes full advantage of Ruby's feature set.

But this comes at a cost of being more complex and difficult to grasp. If you can get to grips with Rails, I suspect you'll find that you'll be far more productive than with plain PHP, since Rails has a lot of functionality that makes life a lot easier for web developers. But that's only once you've learnt the framework, and whilst there are numerous tutorials and articles on Rails, you may find some parts difficult to learn.