1. Introduction
    1. About Agavi
    2. MVC in Agavi
    3. Overview of Agavi
    4. Overview of Application Execution Flow
    5. A Word About Actions
    6. Application filesystem layout
    7. Overview of application configuration
  2. Setting Up The Initial Application
    1. Installing Agavi
    2. Creating an Agavi Project
    3. Finishing The Setup
    4. Finishing The Basic Setup
    5. Installing a New Copy of Your Application
  3. Adding First Code
    1. Creating A New module
    2. Creating A New Action
    3. Tying Things Together — An Introduction To Routing
    4. Fixing The Bloggie Routing
    5. Accessing Request Parameters and Validation Basics
    6. Handling Validation Errors
  4. Putting The M in MVC
    1. Creating A New Model
    2. Adapting The Actions and Views
    3. Custom Validators
  5. Polishing It Up
    1. Layers and Layouts
    2. Applying Our Layout
    3. What Are Slots?
    4. Adding The Post's Title To The URL
    5. Routing Callbacks
    6. Using Callbacks for the Title in URLs
  6. Connecting to a database
    1. The Database Manager
  7. Handling Output Variants
    1. Output Types
    2. Exception Templates
    3. Generating an RSS Feed
  8. Form Processing
    1. Adding a Post
    2. Editing a Post
    3. The Form Population Filter (FPF)
  9. Creating a User Authentication System
  10. Adding To The Master Template

Connecting to a database

So far we've been working with static data and it's about time we change that and connect our blog to a database. Otherwise we'd have a hard time giving the readers a way of commeting on our posts or creating an admin page where we can add or edit posts.

Unlike many other frameworks agavi does not supply a database abstraction library, instead it offers you the freedom of choice. Whether you prefer Propel over Doctrine, are in love with Zend_DB or ez_components, Agavi provides an appropriate adapter. If your poison of choice is something that agavi does not know about yet then it's easy to provide an adapter.

For the sake of simplicity, we'll be using plain PDO and handwritten SQL to connect to a database, although in a serious project we'd be using a serious Object Reationship Manager (ORM).

The data files and schema description required for this step are located in the dev/sql directory of the http://www.agavi.org/guide/stages/stage5.tgz app.