[breck]

Agreed about the Frameworks part. PHP is basically one giant framework that gives you most of what you need (and the few things you it doesn't give you whip up on your own in a few hours and eschew the bloat of the frameworks). That being said, Cake is pretty good.

For an IDE my favorite is PHPDesigner by MPSoftware. Eclipse is pretty good too, just a bit bloated if you like something leaner.