Ah, now that Lord Yggdrasill has made a selection, I can make my confession: I have never actually used a PHP framework for a "real project". Back in 2009, despite being a beginner in Python, I apostatised from PHP by using the Django web framework, and now almost all my web development work is done in Python.
For "newbie friendly", I was fairly impressed that I could get a proper working project within a week, picking up Python and Django simultaneously. I found it easy to understand their variation on MVC where they have Model-Template-View with the framework's machinery working in tandem with some URL configuration as the controller.
In terms of being object oriented, I feel that Django was missing that element in that view functions were the norm, and combined with the generic view functionality, this could be a little awkward. However, the previous version (1.3) introduced generic view classes that could be used as mixins, and this to me filled in that gap nicely.
One advantage that PHP frameworks have over Python frameworks concerning template language is that PHP itself can be used as a template language, by design. In the case of Django, I used Django's own template language, though others can be substituted (but probably not Smarty 😉). In any case, the front-end guy I work with had no problems with it, so it was not a big deal in the end.
