PEAR anyone? I don't use it myself as IMO it's overkill usually - so just wondering if anybody out there is using it?
IMO Smarty and ADODB are just another layer slowing you down however I did roll my own lightweight db abstraction class for convenience for when we move from MySQL to Oracle...
although not strictly PHP, installing an opcode cache (eg Turck/MMCache) has gotta be a no-brainer ...
cheers
rich