Like many web developers I do forms all the time. I found myself doing the same all the time: placing input fields, assigning a name to each, ajax the form, then create the PHP which involves to assign a PHP var to each $_REQUEST['var'], escape and validate data, build the html and emailing the results.

So I found that 70% of the work is duplicated but I just can't duplicate a page and change the fields. I end up wasting more time reformatting, deleting and adding different fields than creating from scratch.

I started planing to program a "list of IDs to html+php" converter in which I'd input all the IDs and this would output the basic html and php. Then I thought: there's got to be thousands of developers that go through this, I'd be reinventing the wheel. So this is my question, I'm trying to find that wheel that somebody must have invented already.

I found this: http://www.trirand.com/blog/jqform/ which does more or less what I'm looking for but it's an expensive solution and it has too much functionality for what I'd be using it.

Which tools do you use to optimize repetitive task about HTML and PHP?