I don't use PHP at all, but one thing I envy PHP (and Perl) users is that they have excellent libraries to interact with SQL databases in the form of PDO (PHP) and DBI (Perl). There's no direct equivalent of this in Python which is a shame. The mantra in Python land is to use ORMs which I am not a fan of.
PyDAL (DAL) seems good on an initial look. I've just started exploring it, but recently wrote a post about publishing database data to PDF using PyDAL and xtopdf, my Python PDF creation library, here:
I use both web2py and DAL on it's own as well. I really like the web2py framework. I started with django, but just wasn't as easy for me to pick up so I switched.