1. Because it's so easy to
2. Because there are more jobs out there for it
You may be seeing something different, but what I'm seeing are more corporate websites and intranets moving to Drupal, more PHP developer jobs cropping up, and more windows environments moving *to* PHP-based content platforms.
Basically, compared to a couple years ago, PHP is now accepted by corporate IT departments, along with dot.Net or Java. Others are niche - maybe they're more viable than PHP for more things, but whatever, that's a pretty big leap for PHP and I declare that to be
More Steam.
If you are talking about how much steam PHP has at Computer Science departments at major universities, then yes. But then, it never had any respect there anyway.
I bet you liked Zope.
