[Laravel][] is a PHP framework that's really a joy to work with -- though I did find the initial learning curve a bit steep.
This tutorial describes a minimum set of steps necessary to pull content from a database and dump it to a url using Laravel's Eloquent ORM. For me, that was the breakthrough moment.
Assuming you've got [Laravel installed][install] and the [database configured][configure], here are the steps needed to get your data from the database into a web browser: