The SitePoint PHP blog has a new tutorial posted introducing you to using ActiveRecord in the Yii2 framework to access the information in your databases. The Active Record design pattern where a single object corresponds to a record in the database (and can be manipulated as such).

The ActiveRecord class in Yii provides an object oriented interface (aka ORM) for accessing database stored data. Similar structures can be found in most modern frameworks like Laravel, CodeIgniter, Symfony and Ruby. Today, we’ll go over the implementation in Yii 2.0 and I’ll show you some of the more advanced features of it.

He introduces the "Model" class first, the based of the ActiveRecord handling, and its parts: attributes, validation and scenarios. He then gets into the creation of the a model instance based off of a table (SQL structure provided) around authors and articles. He includes the code showing how to create a simple model, add in relations and putting it to use. He also shows how to use the built in "find" handling to locate records. Finally he gets into some of the more advanced topics including checking if attributes are "dirty", the "arrayable" functionality and using events/behaviors/transactions on the models.