From BuildInternet.com today there's a new article from Jason Gilmore looking at PHP frameworks and why they matter to both the developers and the community at large.

Having been a PHP programmer for more than a decade, I've come to realize that many of my fellow PHP programmers seem to have a misplaced notion of what being "lazy" is really all about. [...] Suddenly the Web developer was facing so much more than validating user input and connecting to a database [and] the need to be a lazy programmer was more important than ever.

He covers a lot of the basics of frameworks with a focus on the Zend Framework (because of familiarity) - configuration, data validation tools, database connections, display helpers and the inclusion of third-party plugins.