I agree with you that WordPress and Drupal aren't examples of great code. It has to do with the fact that CMSes take a long time to gain traction and acquire a true community, and WordPress and Drupal were started at a time when MVC was almost unknown in the web community. By the time they got traction, the oldest code in the codebase was, well, ugly. Things that have been added to WordPress and Drupal recently are usually okay code-wise.
Several PaaSes support PHP, too, so no major difference there. In a VPS environment, however, setting up PHP doesn't require anything - it works right out of the box - whereas Django and Flask require more packages to be installed /and/ require some lines of server configuration and a script that loads your framework.
To use WSGI (which is what most people would use instead of mod_python) you have to write some lines in your server configuration plus a script that loads your framework of choice.
Compare that to getting CodeIgniter up and running: SFTP the files into the server, and you're up. No server configuration needed.
One could argue that this is not a feature of PHP itself, but that doesn't change the fact that "normal" PHP solutions are simply faster to get up and running.
Regarding hosting I wasn't just talking about shared hosting. Setting up a LAMP VPS is just a couple of clicks. Compare that to setting up e.g. Django or Rails. I personally love Django, Flask, etc., but setting up a website is still faster with PHP (depending on your setup, of course).
First of all, how it started isn't as important as where it is now. And what we have now is a full-fledged programming language. Secondly, if you can build large-scale maintainable websites with PHP, who cares how the language got started originally. It's all about what you can do with the language - and in that regard PHP is a great tool (although certainly not the only tool available).
In the context discussed in this thread, "framework" means code that includes MVC, URL routing, and often an ORM. PHP in itself doesn't offer that; you need a framework such as CodeIgniter or Zend Framework on top. So no, PHP isn't a "framework" in itself (at least not in the way that Django is).
"If you're moving away from the US you'll see a significant drop in salary though"
Depends on whether you're moving from popular dev centers such as Silicon Valley or New York City, and of course it also depends on where you're moving to. My guess is wages here in Denmark should be able to match or beat US wages outside of Silicon Valley and New York City.
Like all features, "position: fixed" can be applied in useful ways and in not so useful ways. I agree that Der Standard's way of using it isn't too good, but overall fixed positions are an excellent feature if you ask me.
"The most important change is that most navigation elements continue to be visible even when you scroll down. The navigation bar, the search box and the search options sidebar have a fixed position"
Strange that "position: fixed" hasn't found its way to popular websites before now. It's been supported by major browsers since the early zeroes (or late nineties?), the only exception being IE (for which you can easily make a fix).