I posted this over at reddit but it didn't gain any momentum.

So here is what is going on: our company was recently purchased by another web shop and I was promoted to head of development here in our office. Our office is completely .NET/SQL Server and the company who purchased us is a *nix/PHP/MySQL shop. Now several of our large clients who are on the .NET platform are up for complete rewrites (the sites are from '04 and are running on the 1.x framework.) While reviewing the proposal for one client with my superior I came across a pretty extensive module which would require several hundred man hours to complete and voiced some concern about it in relation to the quote. One of the guys from the PHP group happen to hear this and told me of a module that they (PHP Group) use in Drupal that does exactly what the proposal in front of me was describing and it only took, at most, 8 hours to completely setup / configure. My superior suggested that I take a look at Drupal and the module in question over the weekend but stressed that we should only go that route if it really made sense.

So this weekend I spun up a CentOS instance in VirtualBox and started playing around with Drupal. I am still fleshing it out so don't have a solid opinion on it just yet. Anyway I have some questions / fears that I was hoping progit could help me out in!

• Has anyone had experience doing this and, if so, how did it turn out?
• I am completely ignorant to what IDE's (if any) are available to for PHP. The last time I worked with PHP it was in Notepad and that was less than intuitive. So is there are more intuitive IDE out there for PHP dev?
• I don't want to scare my .NET guys. Since the merger all of our new business clients that have had relatively small websites have gone on Drupal with the larger sites going on .NET. My concern is that if they see a large site go onto Drupal that they might start getting anxious and start handing out their resumes. For the foreseeable future there are no plans to liquidate the .NET platform and really we can't just from a support standpoint. What would be the best way to approach this?
• Any other helpful info?

Thanks!