For the last couple of weeks I’ve have been working with Propel ORM for PHP and have really enjoyed using it. Coming from Perl I’m spoiled because it has DBIx::Class which is my ORM by choice and makes fetching data from your SQL database including relational data a breeze. Propel does a really nice job with this as well and though the API differs greatly from that of DBIx::Class I found it easy enough to pick up.
Propel nicely integrates with Symfony 2 and I’m happy with my decision to go with Propel. The alternative would’ve been Doctrine but decided against using it, mainly because of having to learn DQL (Doctrine Query Language). DQL is similar to SQL, but I liked the named methods of Propel better (e.g. filterByCampaign($object) or filterByCampaignId($id)) and in the end with Doctrine you’re still busy writing a dialect of SQL. With Propel and DBIx::Class you can still use SQL when needed (and to be honest I still find it to be a bit awkward at times in DBIx::Class but I understand why it is the way it is). I could also have looked at Zend_Db_Table from Zend Framework which I’ve used in the past but found too limiting.
All in all Propel a nice ORM library for PHP. Be sure to check it out if you haven’t already.