I found myself the other day looking for a quick and dirty way to get back the old toarray() functionality from Doctrine v1 for use in populating my zend forms…

This was my first ZendCon, and my overall impression is a positive one. I walked away with a much better understand of the community and Zend’s involvement in it. I also was very fortunate to meet many new people from all over the world and of wide skillset and experience. The networking and conversations that took place outside of the sessions and at restaurants or poolside over drinks is where the real connections are made.

Disclaimer: This post covers at a very high level an approach I’m taking into a possible solution to a challenge I’m facing at work. It should in no way be deemed the end-all, be-all, de facto standard. In fact, I’d love to hear your alternative approaches in the comments below!
There are some things that are  not covered in this post, including:

How to install/compile/configure PHP, CodeIgniter, Doctrine, MySQL, or MongoDB.
The reasons why we are using a Relation Database and a Document-based Database. No really, don’t ask.
How to use the command-line features …