Another developer introduced me to Yii when he got me on board for a PHP contract he needed help with. I was hesitant to take PHP work at first, because my previous experiences were harrowing at best. However, I found the framework was almost pleasant. It had a lot of the features I had grown used to in frameworks like Rails, and though I still have to wrestle with some frustrations of PHP, it is a minor annoyance as I go about writing good OOP MVC code.

I would personally pick another language if I were doing something from scratch, but the benefit is that it is a language others are already familiar with and so adding a framework like Yii isn't too hard.