I still need to settle on a PHP orm.  I’ll have to re-research.  What I really need though is the base framework that allows things like logging, unit tests, functional tests, sessions, db connections, object caching, actions, roles, etc.

Simple PHP I think for unit tests, vs. phpunit.

SimpleXML was fun, but it looks like once you start using it you want a DOM.  Maybe on the client — AJAX.

I’ll stick with PEAR:Log until I need to look again for performance reasons.  Adding “global $logger” to every function or class is a pain though.  That needs a framework.

I might try to extend Ambivalence again for MVC.   It’s ancient by now.

I’ll re-research ORM.  I’ve never been happy with anything out there though.  Maybe propel, or model.  Or the new Zend one. Model transfer objects and a ORM library that uses a DB abstraction later may be the answer, but what about caching?

Yeah right.  Caching in PHP.  The only answer is “save your interpreted parse trees to memory” and Zend  hires everyone who develops one of those.

If I could have caching, messaging, and access to the Apache stack (a la mod_perl) I might be happy with PHP, though my NIH gene means I’d be happy with PHP if I wrote all the rest.