Another vote for PHP and Laravel.
As for why I picked PHP, just one I was always interested in and very big. It had been around a while and wasn't going away anytime soon. And I actually really like PHP. I started programming with C++ then Java in college, and in contrast PHP being loosely typed is kind of nice. I especially like PHP arrays, just throw whatever in it as needed.
As for why I chose Laravel. Well I knew I wanted to use a framework for my project. And did some research, checked out a few options, but ultimatally went with Laravel. It was still newer at the time but gaining popularility, but it was just nice, attractive, easy to use, eloquent (it's object relational mapper - ORM) seemed awesome, and had everything I was looking for in a framework.
I have Eliyo on Laravel and would not go back on that. I would definitely chose Laravel again for similar projects in the future.
I have also used Fat Free Framework and think it was a good choice for what I was after. I use this for Animal Acres. I needed something that was lightweight, but had routing and some other basic things added in, but the biggest need was for it to integrate with my old codebase without much hassle. This works great for me and even now some pages older and some have been integrated. If there is a file availabe in the directory, it lets it map to it as normal, otherwise fat frees routing takes over.
Now I have had some complaints, which I did remedy.
One thing is the ORM always felt clunky even for basic things. I was constantly forgetting how to retrieve objects and have to look it up or copy and paste from paste code. Now it really isn't that hard, but for some reason it just wasn't sticking. So fix, I added eloquent to my project. Works great, love it, just wish I would have started doing that right away as now I have duplicates of the common modals such as user and animal with Fat Free objects and Eloquent objects.
Second thing was the templating system. I never really got that to work. I was using already generated code that had PHP mixed in and everything that may have thrown it off but just decided not to use it since it's optional. I really didn't try that hard to get it working, but anyway after a while I got tried that, and have added in blade as well. Makes development a lot quicker and more enjoyable. So good changes for me, but the core is still Fat Free and can't say I regret that. I actually wouldn't have a problem recommending it for situations where you need to keep the old base and just work on things a section at time. Would just recommend adding in Eloquent and a templating engine of choice as well.