Propel is a handy way to deal with ORM. Rather than figuring out the correct SQL statement to select your elements you just use a -Peer object to select it.
The one drawback is there’s no way of choosing an object at random. You can select the first element of a result set, but not a random one without some changes to your -Peer class.
The quick and dirty fix that I did is to use custom SQL to populate a propel object. It’s a rather suitable approach for more complicated selects. So here’s how we randomly select things:
$con = Propel::getConnection('propel');
$sql = 'SELECT %s.* FROM %s ORDER BY RAND()';
$sql = sprintf($sql,MyObjectPeer::TABLE_NAME,MyObjectPeer::TABLE_NAME);
$stmt = $con->createStatement();
$rs = $stmt->executeQuery($sql, ResultSet::FETCHMODE_NUM);
$objects = MyObjectPeer::populateObjects($rs);
$object = $objects[0];
If you know you’re going to only use one object, SELECT %s.* FROM %s ORDER BY RAND() LIMIT 1 will work as well.