That's what I was wondering. I also had a look through the Symfony2 docs. Perhaps it's just me being a Python bigot, but the code there doesn't look any better

That's what I was wondering. I also had a look through the Symfony2 docs. Perhaps it's just me being a Python bigot, but the code there doesn't look any better than the raw PHP: http://symfony.com/doc/current/book/from_flat_php_to_symfony2.html#the-sample-application-in-symfony2 http://symfony.com/doc/current/book/from_flat_php_to_symfony... And the "helper function to render templates" in the section above it also looks fairly deranged. Isn't that included in the framework somewhere? The bits that do look ok seem to be because they're copying Django/Jinja2 templating.