I am an amateur PHP coder, and have built a couple of dozen projects from scratch (including fairly simple e-commerce systems with user authentication, PayPal integration etc - all coded by hand from a clean page. Have also done a price comparison engine that takes data from multiple sites etc.). But I am no expert with OO and other such advanced techniques - I just have a fairly decent grasp of the basics of data processing, logic, functions and trying to optimize code as much as possible.

I just want to make this clear so you have some idea of where I'm coming from.

I have a couple of fairly large new projects on my plate for corporate clients - both require bespoke database-driven applications with complex relationships, many tables and lots of different front-end functions to manipulate that data for the internal staff in these companies.

I figured building these systems from scratch would probably be a huge waste of time. Instead, there must be tools out there that will allow me to construct MySQL databases and build the pages with things like pagination, action buttons, table construction etc.

Some kind of database abstraction layer, or system generator, if you will.

What tool do you recommend for such a purpose for someone at my level? Open source would be great, but I don't mind paying for something decent as well.

Thanks for any advice.