I hope you don't mind me posting a non-technical enquiry in here but i'm interested to know your thoughts.

Not at all, you welcome!

The trouble is I'm a PHP person now really, I think it's a fantastic language with so much flexibility and support. The developer community is huge and with most applications these days being written in PHP, it makes plugging in other applications very easy.

Oh, c'mon! I'm glad you like it, but your claims sound trollish as all the similar ones we hear so often. You may have tried a Super Search like ?node_id=3989;HIT=PHP;re=N;M. One little gem in which you may be interested and that I'm directly offering to you is Perl needs Zend.

I guess my query is, what's happened in the 2/3 years I've been away? Have there been advancements with the language?

Yes! (Just to mention the most recent ones!)

Will it ever take over PHP or has that particular battle been lost?

How could ever the battle be lost? I have friends routinely using Mathematica for their daily work since it is... err... well... better suited for their typical application area? Has the battle with Mathematica been lost?!?

I notice this website is exactly the same as it was 2 years ago too, hehe so I guess the web2.0 thing hasn't quite hit these dusty corridors (it's quite refreshing in some ways).

How could a website about Perl and in particular its UI, which incidentally has changed considerably over the years, have to do with the success of Perl itself as a language especially in comparison with PHP? In particular what does "Web 2.0" -a loosely defined term in and of itself- have to do with the questions you're asking, given that it's not all gold that which is "Web 2.0": possibly ranging AIUI from nifty clean websites like Google services and wikis to brainkilling horrors like MySpace... FWIW, an oft repeated mantra of my own is that I'm often on, and like, clpmisc, which being USENET technology even predates the web, yet it remains one of the "places" where I can find the most precious technical info and in depth discussions about Perl.