PHP is a scripting language, Rails is a framework
Should this author really be writing stories with such silly headlines given that they're seemingly unaware of what PHP, Ruby and Rails actually are?
In this case, a project was started with dubious goals - to replace 100,000 lines of PHP (with a lot of hand-written SQL and a legacy database schema) with Ruby on Rails, a framework with fairly legendary workflow improvements built on the concept of convention over configuration. By the look of it he may even have been trying to migrate from MySQL to Postgres at the same time, just to really make sure he failed.
Both Ruby and PHP are scripting languages. There's no real reason why you can't do anything in Ruby you can do in PHP, the only real differences are performance and available existing frameworks. Ruby is arguably a nicer language once you know it, given PHP is an ugly piece of shit.
But essentially here the issue is that this guy started writing a project in a language he didn't know, on a framework he hadn't properly evaluated against his needs, and was intending to replace hundreds of thousands of lines of core business systems in a single roll-out. This seems foolhardy in the extreme.
Then when he pulled the plug he didn't go back to PHP and start again with a new PHP-based framework comparable to Rails - he threw out the idea of a framework entirely and wrote his own. There's no reason he couldn't have done that in Ruby just as effectively, but he went back to what he was familiar with.
This has nothing to do with Gosling's comments and nothing to do with a victory for PHP over Ruby unless you consider familiarity of one particular developer a victory.
A stupid headline? Never...