In the first part of this series, we took a look at the basics of the FuelPHP framework. In this second-part, we'll be stepping it up a gear and move onto some more advanced topics! We'll be creating an admin panel for our application, cover the common uses of the ORM and use the Authentication package to restrict access.

He walks you through setting up Oil (the command-line tool that comes bundled with Fuel) and using it to create a new application. There's a few steps of configuration to connect to a database and setting up a few access groups (like "Banned", "Guests" and "Administrators"). Oil is used again to create users in the database and to auto-generate a lot of the controller/view code you'll need for the admin tool. He then gets into the more technical parts - updating the current code to be able to do things like using the ORM to fetch database results and being able to add comments to posts.

Frameworks have been the topic du jour here at PHPBuilder.com, with numerous recent articles covering DooPHP and Fat-free. In this latest stop on the framework tour, we'll check out Yii, a relatively new framework (less than three years old) that boasts an impressive array of features and an equally impressive array of users, among them the enormously popular Stay.com.

He walks you through the install (downloading the latest version) and shows how to use the command-line tool to automatically generate the basic website structure. He continues on showing how to update the main page and template, how to get it connected to a MySQL database and how to use the Gii tool to create basic admin forms for working with the tables.

The other day, Klint Finley wrote a very good walkthrough of using the new Multisite functionality of WordPress 3.0. In the comments, a lot of people wanted to know how to use your own Top-Level-Domains. Since I'm doing that now, here's a quick walkthrough/how-to guide.

He uses the WordPress MU Domain Mapping plugin to get the job done and, via screenshots and a little bit of code, shows you how to use the admin panel to easily set up the domains and the sites they should resolve to.

I quite frequently find myself wanting some form of sub-modules, usually in admin systems where one "admin" module just doesn't cut it for larger sites. Without modules we're stuck with an AdminController.php which obviously gets very messy, very quickly. With modules, we can have an "admin" module with as many controllers as we wish. This is fine, until a site needs to manage lots of discrete elements.

His solution was a bit of a "hijack" of the boostrap resource for the "admin" requests that would allow him to dynamically add modules thanks to some simple mapping. You can download his example here.

In this series of articles we'll implement several options to make WordPress easier for your clients. You can probably find plugins to achieve the same thing, but this code is easy, flexible, and won't need to be updated (unless you want to make updates yourself).

He talks about how to manually do two things to make the clients' lives simpler - change the logo to something more company-related and remove the update notification from the admin panel so they don't get confused as to what the update means.

When a file is uploaded using sfForm in the admin generator, by default the filename that's used is a random string, which can look bad in URLs. If you want to change this, it's not immediately obvious how - but it is incredibly simple.

The Symfony project does have some documentation on the topic, but it's not the easiest to read. It basically boils down to is defining a function in your extended class based on the name of the file where you can change the name however you'd like. Code snippets are included to make the point a bit more clear.

Andrew attempted to give the most complete answer but the truth is the answer is lost in the dim and distant past. There is nothing you can do about it. On every install a superadmin user is created with username "admin" and userid "62".

Since this is a common "feature" of the older Joomla installs, it could potentially be used in a sort of attack on the site. Fortunately, as of the Joomla 1.6 release, the installation allows you to select a username of your own (while still suggesting "admin") with a new change to the user's ID - 42 instead of 61.

If you're looking for a simple tool that uses Zend Framework's robust database classes (such as Zend_Db and Zend_Db_Table), you can check out zdbform. It's a short yet effective library that let's you perform simple administration tasks on your database, with minimal coding. It's not a full blown phpMyAdmin, but it's a simple way to view, edit and add your tables rows on a web interface.

He shows how you can use it in a script - from the front controller to the input forms - and some of the changes he needed to make in the form class itself to handle a few of the bit more tricky parts.

Magento is the next generation of eCommerce! It is incredibly well architectured, fully flexible, scalable, and fun to work with. If you've ever thought about creating an online shop, Magento is your choice! Today we are going to install it locally with XAMPP Lite and review the essentials.

The tutorial also helps you to install the XAMPP package - a Windows all-inclusive web platform that includes Apache, MySQL, PHP and phpMyAdmin. Once its started, you can create the database Magento needs and import its data. Log into the admin, change a few settings and you're all set.

Net.tuts+ has published several great tutorials on user login systems. Most tutorials only deal with authenticating the user, which allows for two levels of security: logged in and not logged in. For many sites, a finer degree of control is needed to control where users can go and what they can do. Creating an access control list (ACL) system will give you the flexibility for granular permissions.

They walk you through the database creation (user information), coding the ACL and user authentication classes, how to check a user's permissions and how to create a user admin screen to allow for easy maintenance. You can find the complete source of the tutorial here.