Advice for Experienced web developer newish to PHP

Hi all, I'm a experienced web programmer, that is taking on a PHP project. I'm really looking to get the tricks and tips that come with experience, the lazy way :-) Project Overview Its basically a corporate info website, with an admin section to add/change content. It will have several top level section some of which will have subsection contain different type of articles e.g. news, press releases section, and events. Some of these will have fields specific to the clients website e.g. "Internal Part No." I don't need : Forums Polls User login/ membership (except admin) I've looked at some of the CMS out there, but they seem too complex for my needs. I need something more geared to an information site than a community Constraints - Can't use zone/plone - Shared server What I'm looking for - libs, classes etc. to help displaying html and forms. e.g. paging records 10 at a time, generating client side validation etc. - some sort of database abstraction layer . it would be nice to have this layer return objects of the correct type - a php rss lib - a simple php based gallery example. - Thanks All .