In this Nettuts+ mini-series, we'll build a web application from scratch, while diving into a great new PHP framework that's rapidly picking up steam, called Laravel. In this lesson, we'll be working on an integral part of any web application: the Models. Along the way, we'll learn about Laravel's amazing ORM implementation: Eloquent.

The tutorial introduces you to the concept of "Models" and some of the conventions that surround them in the Laravel framework. They show some of the most common operations (CRUD) and how to define relationships between the models (has many, has one, etc). They apply this to their "Instapics" example application, creating the interfaces for the users, profiles, relationships, photos and comments. They include the code to create the controllers/views to go along with them, making a simple interface to show users and their photos.

You can find out more about the Eloquent ORM in this section of the Laravel manual.