Hannes Magnusson has a new post to his site talking about the new update to the MongoDB driver for PHP and its focus on simplicity.

For the past few months I've been working on a "next-gen" MongoDB driver for PHP -- codename "phongo". The aim was to build a new PHP extension ontop of the mongoc and libbson libraries to reduce maintenance of the extension itself and focus more on providing the ecosystem with improved support and libraries.

The new driver is available on PECL (called "mongodb", surprisingly enough). It doesn't include any of the bells and whistles found in the previous "mongo" driver. It doesn't include any `group` or `count` command helpers, and you won't find any Collection or Database objects; however, it really doesn't need any of these things.

He talks about the three basic things it can do: execute a command, a write or a query to locate records. He also answers the question many developers have about this shift to simplicity and provides a link to a PHP library to make porting over existing MongoDB handling simpler.