As far as PHP frameworks, I'm familiar with Symfony, Laravel and Zend. I got started on Codeigniter and CakePHP, but honestly could no longer recommend those considering the power available in other frameworks.
Out of the three above, I'd say Laravel is the best mix of ease of use and feature set. All three can be fairly complex to get into, but the dependency injection component in each of them helps you to create independently testable classes, which can really benefit you in the long run. They also integrate with composer, allowing you to install modules for flexibility. A programmer's goal is not to write code - it's to solve problems, the solution to which usually lies in code. But most of the time somebody has already addressed your problem suitably, and package managers like composer help you to avoid writing code when you really don't need to be.
A lot of these frameworks are designed to mimic Rails or Sinatra somewhat, but they don't have quite as much "magic" as Rails.
My recommendation will go to either Laravel, whose ORM I like very much, or Symfony 2 for flexibility. As mentioned, these can have a pretty steep learning curve, but the benefits outweigh the negatives IMO.
If you wanted to get started with Laravel, it's going to be as easy as following the instructions on their site:
http://laravel.com/docs/quick#installation
You should first install Composer (
https://getcomposer.org/doc/00-intro.md ... on-windows ), as you're going to need it anyway, and msysgit (if on Windows) or git if on Linux. Then install Laravel using composer, which functions a lot like NPM or gem.