What sort of frameworks should I be looking at?
Try a modern framework like Kohana or maybe something more engineered-OO like Zend Framework.
You also might want to consider a simple procedural framework instead of an OO framework. PHP does very, very well working at low levels.
Avoid Cake. It tries to be Rails-like, but not only do Rails idioms translate very poorly into PHP, Cake is stuck in the design era of PHP4.
