MPTT is what the Propel (symfony’s orm) nested set behaviour implements. Its just that it seems incapable of loading the fixtures data in properly without this horrible hack to set up the lft/rght values.

I have used the Cake one before – its how I knew the performance gain was big enough to be worth messing about doing the above for!

Symfony also allows you to use Doctrine as the ORM – the nested set behaviour on doctrine seems to have fewer issues.

Sounds like this http://book.cakephp.org/view/91/Tree would be ideal, if only you could switch to #cakephp.

haha, just joshing, but seriously, if you need N level depth and speed, you want MPTT.

j