I currently do a lot of work in PHP, and although it isn't my favorite language to work with (braindead built-in library, for one), it's hard to argue with the results we get.

For the good of your soul, use a framework. We currently like Zend Framework, but I've heard good things about CakePHP and Symfony. If you stick with the framework and follow a sane MVC strategy you'll fix most of the problems you'll have using PHP as an HTML templating language.