Propel 1.3 has served me very well over the past few years and I’m absolutely confident that recent projects would not have been delivered so quickly without it. However, when stuff gets a little crazy, you need to hydrate your objects using hand-crafted SQL. Building up a SQL in a variable and passing it between functions can be a nightmare to get right. Since I was already using Zend Framework, I decided to try and get Propel objects back from a Zend_Db_Select generated query. The Relational API in the upcoming 1.5 release of Propel would make this possible without the need for hacks and workarounds…