CodeIgniter seconded. Makes PHP programming a lot easier. Also check out CodeIgniter fork Kohana. I use it to run an advertising network, works really well - ORM and tons of libraries (and of course, being open-source) makes it great.
Yup I have to admit CodeIgniter rocks. Made hacking in PHP worthwhile again.
Code Igniter framework for PHP.
Thanks. I'll take a look at that.
My personal gripe with Code Igniter is that it doesn't have a built-in templating language (this is by design).
I absolutely love Smarty (smarty.net) and highly recommend it and have used it in many projects so far.
There have been attempts to integrate Smarty into CI but I saw a benchmark that showed that combination was unacceptably slow and won't scale well.
I probably would say it's a closer call if we hadn't found a great MVC framework for PHP called Code Igniter that just makes PHP (of all things) much more pleasurable to hack in than it used to be.
All this being said, you're not risking much by going with Python/Django. But if the farm is on the line, I'd personally have to go with LAMPhp.