Laravel is a great framework and has really helped push the community towards writing tests and producing packages that can be easily shared via composer. Of course Symfony has a big part to play in Laravel's success to.

2013 was a good year for PHP. Most of the time when I hear people complaining about the language, it's as if things haven't changed since 2005.

There's a lot of horrible, badly written spaghetti code out there in PHP that doesn't exist in other languages, but there's also probably much more decent code written in PHP and I think that trend is only set to continue.