tentative foray into php coding advice

If you're not interested in PHP coding please stop reading.

I'm open to correction on this, but I thought I'd put it out there in case it's helpful to anyone OR in case someone can point me to a simpler solution.

I've been developing the simple content management that powers the strangeday site news and gigs. The key points here are:
- I was using object oriented programming
- I used the PDO (PHP Data Objects) class for the database connections etc.

When it came to uploading, I quickly realised that my hosting provider, A Small Orange, has PDO disabled. So far so bad. However since I'd separated out what I was doing with the Object Oriented approach it was simply a matter of changing the database connection class and everything else would be hunky-dory.

Not so much.

My actual page was using the PDO Statement which gets returned as an array. Here's the final output code:

 <?php
  $i = 1;
  foreach ($results as $newsitem)
  {
 ?>
   <p class='line<?=$i?>'><span class='newsitem'>..</span><?=$newsitem['title']?></p>
 <?php  
   $i++;
  }
 ?>

And here's the PDO code that was returning the query:

 try
 {
  if ($squery = $this->dbh->query($query)) return $squery;
 }  
 catch (PDOException $e)
 {
  die ("Database error @select: " . $e->getMessage() . "<br />\n");
 }

My troubles began when I stopped using PDO::Query and changed to using mysql_query and mysql_fetch_assoc so that it would work on A Small Orange.

I ended up with an error in the foreach. What I wanted to do was change the connection side of things so that I could switch it depending on whether the hosting environment supported PDO or not.

What I needed to do was output an array that was functionally the same as the PDO Statement array. Here's what I came up with:

 $result = mysql_query($query);
 $squery = array();
 while ($row = mysql_fetch_assoc($result))
 {
  $keys = array();
  $values = array();
  foreach ($row as $key=>$value)
  {
   $keys[]=$key;
   $values[]=$value;
  }
  $squery[] = array_combine($keys, $values);
 }
 return $squery;   

Obviously this needs error handling and I also wrote functionality into the class that would switch based on a PDO = true or false flag type arrangement but that's essentially my solution.

Comments/suggestions?