CakePHP

A Year ago, our development structure was a mess.
Switching over to CakePHP massively improved out coding speed an quality, with minor training time.
No Framework is perfect, and CakePHP is still maturing, but overall it provided a very solid base for all the projects we have used it for, and pretty much every Programmer that was introduced to it continued using it on his own projects afterwards.

Cake will make your php life easier. That said, like all OO php, the stack can be relatively heavy. So get familiar with a good opcache and some of the caching tools in cake (or memcache). IMHO go straight to 1.2 which is an RC2. Also take a look at the 'bakery' http://bakery.cakephp.org/ which will give a leg up with helpful components, etc. All in all cakephp is one of the best organized and executed php projects I've used.

If you are looking for a robust, flexible PHP framework to enhance your life as a developer, then really you should look no further.

As you might know, there isn't a single tool that can suffice for every single project, however if we were to imagine one... CakePHP would come as close as it is feasibly possible.

Yes, you should expect some learning curve, but given the great community behind the project the pain of learning can be easily reduced by the advice from developers (who are actually always in-touch with the users) as well as many, many seasoned cake-users.

I won't mention all the buzz-words that CakePHP covers, as that is something you'll learn in your first days of working with it.

A top-notch product, that has truly played a very important and positive influence in life as a developer.

You will reduce your programming time significantly, makes User authenticaiton and ACL a piece of cake.. I have been using it for less than a month and I love it.. once you try it you wont go back to writting your own php scripts..

I've been using cake for almost 1 and half years and found it to be best addition to my toolbox as a web developer. I wouldn't develop another php app without it. I've try a number of the other php MVC frameworks available and this is by far the best. I can quite comfortably say it is the most stable MVC-php framework with the recent 1.2 release and has a growing and active community essential for any Open Source projects success. The documentation is growing constantly and there is a healthy community of CakePHP bloggers that provide that little bit of extra knowledge when you can't find what you need in the docs.

CakePHP saved me from the horrid repetitive tasks of developing an app in php.