Im going to go out on a limb here and say, they best programming i ever got done, the best ideas i ever had and features i ever came up with, was with NOT using a game engine like mccodes. Theres a great feeling involved with starting from scratch, the way to do it is to not get caught up on how it looks atm but instead start writing a functions.php page, write all your classes and functions first, after that is done it really is just plug and play, make a blank php page that include the functions page and make sure to set your globals inside your class functions. TRUST ME get off the engines, do it by hand, you will love yourself.
Also do not make the mistakes that many many many php programmers make, if your going to learn php more, start learning classes right now, because that is what will make you a great game developer, learning to do an if statement and print the action is cool and all, but classes take away all the gobbly goop and make it easier to read, easier to manage and will take your game to an entire new level.