On a typical modern website, most pages are dynamically generated from various database tables. There is normally the main content area which contains content such as the latest news stories. Then there are usually various boxes in a side bar such as the latest pictures from the galleries which contains the latest content in various other tables. How those boxes are developed differs in best practices between Rails and Symfony...
After building my personal site from scratch in Symfony/PHP5 - I decided as I am leaning towards Rails now it was time to rewrite it in Rails. I had some good experiences during the process and overall I'm pleased with it. This may serve as a useful push if you're currently a PHP developer tempted by Rails.
As a contractor it is always wise to stay on top of upcoming technologies, today's niche market may be tomorrow's big earner. This year I decided to learn Ruby on Rails, so I thought I'd write a post on why I think Rails is such as excellent development system.
After a horrible experience (and putting it off for months) I've finally launched my new site. It's not feature complete but it's a good base to build on.