There are a lot of PHP based frameworks along you want to deal with the verbosity of the PHP language.

Two types of frameworks : "Full stack" and "glue" "Full Stack" are more automated and 'easy' to start and create CRUD. "Glue" are more powerful, full of libraries but less automated and a learning curve more demanding.

Full Stack - Cakephp - Symfony - Kohana - CodeIgniter

Glue - Pear - Zend Framework

The two extremes are Cake and Zend Framework

If you want to stay with PHP try Kohana. If not, Rails (Ruby) or Django (Python) are the best out there.

I recommend you to stop deciding and start doing something with one of these.