With all this interest why don't you all work together on developing modules and submissions to the Eclipse PHP project?
I know theres been reasons why people choose not to go with Eclipse, I agree that C++ is a nice fast language, but perhaps its low-level interface makes it hard to develop quickly (I don't mean to start a programming flame war here), but it's a great place to get started. And for those that do not know Java, the same could be said by Java developers who say "I don't know C++", really speaking from my experience in both your design skills in programming are so much more important and there are some great articles explaining the differences between the languages so you can adapt super fast.
http://www.eclipse.org/php/