If you want this to really work, check out PHP::Interpreter. It might be tough to install, but it's written by a well-known PHP hacker named George Schlossnagle. It was sponsored by Portugal Telecom and released as open-source by Kineticode so they could use it with Bricolage. As a result, when you get it running, it works very well and should just "handle" stuff for you. It lets the Portugal Telecom Bricolage guys write they're templates in PHP rather than Mason or Template Toolkit yet still talk directly to Bricolage (which is written in Perl).