I work professionally with PHP and Ruby so I follow the PHP community as well.

Although you are right that it is possible to write bad code in any language, in my opinion it is especially easy in PHP. I have to work with a lot of code from developers that are not so experianced and I have to say that the PHP code is often way worse than the Ruby code.

That being said I think that it is possible to write good and maintanable code with PHP. Facebook and Wikipedia are built on top of it and I think the code quality there isn't bad at all. My point is just that PHP makes it harder and for solo developers this is an unnecessary hurdle