Lightweight PHP library alternative to common MVC frameworks

Question

Hi hi, I'm looking for a easy to learn php library to use for my coming web app project. I've recently finished a web app with fully handwritten raw php code and it's absolutely hard to be done again for another project.
even though I have the recent project code snippets to be used again, but due to their non-structural arrangement (not object oriented), i have no passion to use 'em again.
I have no experience with common frameworks like ZF, CakePhp, CodeIgniter, so I think to get my hands on a multipurpose OO library for my web app and the framework learning will be the next step! any suggestion?

Update:
Many thanks guys, I have not enough time to get through the depth of every lib or framework you have kindly introduced. Since I'm going one step further I'm going to use ZF as famous framework which could provide me more job opportunities perhaps. thankssss :)

Update (A FEW MONTHES LATER!):
BTW, It takes too long for me to get familiar with ZF :(

Answer 1

CodeIgniter is very lightweight and flexible. But if you're using PHP5 you might want to check out Kohana, which is a PHP5 fork of CodeIgniter and takes advantage of some of PHP5's features.

Answer 2

Even thou you said lightweight, I suggest you get started with Zend Framework. You don't have to use all the ZF libraries, just go with the basic ones and get acquainted with the ones you think can ease your development process. It's easy to get started as well.

Answer 3

What do you exactly mean by lightweight?

Well, anyways I'd recommend you reconsider Zend Framework. There is nice quickstart document. As ZF is so complete, you don't loose any time on reinventing the wheel and can roll out new products within days. Also you have to take in account that it's the most popular framework and the only one with support from Zend Technologies. So it's likely that it'll stay on the market. With other you can't really be sure.

Answer 4

Look into Yii Framework its PHP5 only, relatively new but I believe the authors (who wrote other frameworks before this one) took the best of all worlds and baked it into Yii.

Answer 5

Flourish is a PHP library you can live with, Also Swiftlet is a lightweight new born PHP MVC framework.
Personally I didn't use Swiftlet yet but it looks very promising.

Answer 6

I've heard nice things about Kohana, it's supposed to fit the lightweight profile.

Answer 7

PHP Fat-Free Framework will fit your requirements quite well. Recommended for novices and experts alike.

Answer 8

shameless plug: http://code.google.com/p/php-web-toolkit/. It comes as a starting website - you can browse the sources online just to get a feeling of it in use. It's not OOP, and IMO, OO frameworks will not automatically solve your problems of organizing your code.