eliminate git modules.  feature-mode and emails-rails-reloaded are unused, color-theme is now built in, and everything else is available via ELPA
extra cleanup-- rcodetools is unused, as far as I can tell?  And creates a gem dependency to run emacs?
use packaged php-mode; put rcodetools back; fix syntax highlighting so our custom colors get picked up in tmux without having to set TERM=xterm-256color