A recent post on the Developer Tutorials blog takes a look at a fundamental part of several of the PHP (and other language) frameworks out there - the Object Relational Mapping (ORM) layer for database access.

Instead of direct database access, an ORM layer in a PHP framework can make "objects" stored in a database behave like actual objects from a programming perspective - for example, creating a new "car" stored in the database could involve a call to $car->new(). By abstracting actual database access, web development can be more productive and result in more reliable applications. Here's a quick intro to ORM in PHP.

They talk about ORM's role in how applications interface with data (abstracted out to objects) and some examples of it in current frameworks - CakePHP and Symfony.

On the Zend Developer Zone, jonwage has posted about an ORM (Object-Relational mapping) he came across that can help abstract out your interface with your backend database - Doctrine.

One of its key features is the ability to optionally write database queries in an OO (object oriented) SQL-dialect called DQL inspired by Hibernates HQL. This provides developers with a powerful alternative to SQL that maintains a maximum of flexibility without requiring needless code duplication.

The project's page gives the full details on the features it offers and has links to the latest downloads so you can try it out for yourself. There's even a blog you can subscribe to to keep up to date.

Sebastian Bergmann has figured out half of the puzzle he was working on but is still a bit stuck on the second half. He knows how to mine information from Subversion, but not they queries to ask the database for the info he needs.

I have written a small PHP script (the initial version of the script can be found here) to import the relevant data from a Subversion repository into the following tables of a relational database. [...] What I need now is two queries to ask the database

There's already been tons of comments in an effort to help him out, but it doesn't look quite like he's resolved the issue just yet.

UPDATE 12.06.207: Seems he's found a solution that'll work for him - here's the script.

From DevShed today, there's a new tutorial that will help you create a relational content management system with PHP and MySQL.

This article will show you how to build a simple relational content management system. What is a relational CMS you ask? Well, a relational CMS lets you create articles that have child articles.

This works similiar to other CMSes which have categories and then articles; we will just combine them together to be more relational. This also helps to create a nice search engine friendly site quickly.

The tutorial starts off immediately, giving you the SQL layout to start importing into your database. It assumes you have a base-level understanding of how to use both PHP and MySQL on your platform of choice. From there, it gives you the common functions to get the system working, and follows with a "howto" on managing the articles in the system.