Any thoughts on PHP frameworks?

On Python, I've heard that TurboGears is a pretty good framework as well.

I remember reading somewhere that you don't run Django, it runs you. Any fiction in that?

I use Django (GeoDjango actually) at my full-time job, and love it. My progression was PHP -> Python -> TurboGears -> Pylons -> Django. I can say with confidence that it is the best of them all. Yes, many choices have been made for you, but they have been made in an elegant, Pythonic way, and you retain the ability to get under the hood to a healthy extent.

Django is fantastic, and 'it runs you' would only hold true if you used the basic features and built in admin system and nothing else.

That aside, I said I progressed from Pylons to Django because I would choose Django if I had to do the Pylons project over again. Why? Because although I rejected (rebelled against?) it at the time, being 'forced' into an ORM for data entities would have been a really good thing. Since Pylons "lets" you shirk an ORM, I did ... but the result feels more like PHP than Python. Turns out Django's hand-holding is, in many cases, good because the answer they provide is the smart thing to do. And doesn't that sound like a description of Python itself?

Would I choose an ORM-ified Pylons experience over Django? Probably not. Django routing seems better, there's Django-enhanced unit testing, and I even prefer the way Django forces you to keep Python out of your templates in favor of "template tags" and "filters".

Perhaps most importantly, Django has nearly-impeccable documentation, and a thriving community.

I also find PHP to be quite the cognitive overhead. The libraries seem to lack consistent naming conventions and since it's all one global namespace, there are a LOT of names to remember. Coding in PHP often feels like repeatedly looking up library functions and 'assembling' them, rather than 'writing' something.

CakePHP is a powerful, popular one. It gives you Ruby/Django's famed MVC in PHP.