In a recent post to his site Alex Bilbie shows how to integrate CouchDB and CodeIgniter to make a simple NoSQL-based application. He helps you through each step of the way - from installation down to working code.
So I’ve decided that I want to properly document my MongoDB exploration and I may as well help others to learn with me. [...] What I’m going to do here in part 1 is install MongoDB, install the PECL PHP extension and just play around a bit.
He installs the latest version of MongoDB from packages and the latest version of the PECL extension to get PHP connected to it. He sets up a basic CodeIgniter install and creates the basic structure of the application. He creates the simple "blog" application (quickly becoming the "hello world" for framework examples) that can take in a title, content and author and add/view the information in the locally running database.