On the Query7 blog there's a recent post introducing you to the Kohana PHP-based framework (Kohana3, to be exact) and its setup.

This is a brief introduction into the Kohana framework. The next two tutorials will cover how to build a blog in Kohana. [...] Installing Kohana is very straight forward, just download the latest stable version of Kohana and unzip it. No need to mess around with yaml or xml files like other frameworks.

The installation gives you a set of environment tests that run to ensure your environment is set up correctly. If it's not, instructions on how to fix things are included. They also talk about the filesystem structure and where you can find the configuration settings if you'd like to change them away from the default. There's also mention of the support the framework has for modules - basic packages that can be easily included as needed for things like database functionality, OAuth support and unit testing interfaces.