Here is an example blog post that uses the old syntax:
columns = ["character", "franchise"]
data = [("link", "zelda"), ("king k rool", "donkey kong"), ("samus", "metroid")]
rdd = spark.sparkContext.parallelize(data)
df = rdd.toDF(columns)
It would be great to update this post (and all the other code snippets in blog posts) to be Spark Connect compatible.