After a few discussions with the frontend group at work about writing everything yourself, they suggested that I looked at CakePHP. It looks a lot like Ruby On Rails and has most of the features it has, just for php :)
CakePHP is a Rapid development framework, written in php for php. It has a lot of cool features, such as Active Directory objects for databases, “search friendly urls” (almost by default), a good MVC pattern and much more!