Another thought about PHP ORMs that occurred to me today, should I ever fall victim to that particular land war in Asia... What if a Model class exposed a static method for configuration of child classes, which accepted a Closure that was invoked upon instantiation, like `Model#initialize` in Ruby?

Model.php

<?php

class Model 
{
    static $hooks = [ ];
    
    /**
     * Add initialization hook $init to (FIFO) queue, which will be bound to the
     * instance of the object at initialization.
     * 
     * @param Closure $init hook to add to (FIFO) queue
     */
    static method init(Closure $init){
        static::$hooks['init'][] = $init;
    }
    
    function __construct($options = []){
        // . . .
        foreach ( static::$hooks['init'] as $init ){
            $init = $init->bindTo($this, $this);
            $init($options);
        }
    }
}

User.php

<?php

class User extends Model
{
    // business logic methods go here...
}

User::init(function($options){
    $this; // is bound to Model instance...
});

In retrospect, I don't really like this pattern much in PHP. The Closures represent a memory leak, since they get cloned in Model.php:20 as a result of binding them. There would need to be very few instances of each Model subclass to make this memory-manageable, as in Lithium's ORM.