Modern PHPs shining light is the Laravel framework and the ecosystem built up around it. If you're going to start a database-driven website projects in PHP there really isn't a good reason to not use and learn Laravel (or Lumen if you want something more lightweight).
That being said if you're not tied to PHP I'm not sure I'd necessarily recommend it. The obvious alternatives worth looking into are Ruby on Rails or Python with Flask or Django.
That being said if you're not tied to PHP I'm not sure I'd necessarily recommend it. The obvious alternatives worth looking into are Ruby on Rails or Python with Flask or Django.