[Pedrom]

PHP is not strongly typed as C# so it doesn't need generics or templates or better said it wouldn't make much difference on performance unless it would be compiled (which is not the case on the standard).

I don't think that an official compiler is planned but HipHop (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HipHop_for_PHP) might change that in the future.

There are plenty of MVC Frameworks for PHP you can try with SilverStripe or CakePHP.