As ex-PHP programmer converted to Python I will say it will drive you insane lol. But I've managed to live some of my last PHP projects with with Kohana, Codeigniter or Zend.

Definitely take a look at CodeIgniter. After going through several frameworks myself when faced with a necessity to switch from Python to PHP for several projects, this is the one I ended up staying with. It's really great actually. I might have ended up using it in a very Djangoesque way, but definitely did enjoy my time with it.

I've had a torrid love affair with cakephp for many years, it works but it hurts you. I started learning symphony which is far from simple but seems to be worth it before I jumped over to django/pyhon. Kohana was my second choice after symphony as it seemed to have a good grasp on what it does and it did a lot less.

Whatever you do, Zend is a GIANT pile of over-engineered junk.

Personally, I would recommend code igniter, even though the author of the article seems to disagree.

It's a very lightweight, basic, MVC framework. Clear cut documentation and if you look at their code, it's clean and easy to understand.