In my opinion, I found a framework(or so called un-framework) that gets ORM just right in PHP: http://flourishlib.com/

I too ended up using Smarty and doing the rest myself, but I feel that this particular framework has gone in the right direction.

The best thing about Flourish is that it doesn't pretend to be Java, it acknowledges PHP.

Bottom line: it made my code smaller and a lot readable. I highly recommend checking it out.