Phil Sturgeon (a developer on the FuelPHP and CodeIgniter frameworks) has a new post to his blog today talking about the Laravel framework and how "it's awesome" .

You might not expect to hear that from a CodeIgniter and FuelPHP developer, but it's true. Taylor has done a brilliant job writing code that is clean, functional and has built a huge community of smart developers in less than a year of active development. People are flooding to Laravel from other frameworks and that's great for the PHP community. [...] Taylor has done a brilliant job of building up a framework that takes advantage of callbacks, IoC and event driven behaviour very well.

He talks about why he likes Laravel and the features it includes that appeal to him...and why he doesn't use it yet. He notes that it's a "snazzy new framework" that gives PHP developers tired of the usual framework methods something new to try out, noting that it can help to keep the "brain drain" of PHP developers away from the language just because they get bored.

On the NetTuts.com site today there's a new tutorial from Sahan Lakshitha about creating forms in FuelPHP, the PHP 5.3-centric framework.

Thanks to FuelPHP's fieldset class, working with forms couldn't be easier. With a few lines of code, you can easily generate and validate a form. Today, we're going to learn how to do just that!

He starts with guiding you through a simple install of the FuelPHP framework and configuring it to connect to a MySQL database. He shows how to set up a model, specify its properties and creating a controller to handle the user interaction. Using the definitions in the model, FuelPHP can automatically generate a form, complete with default options and some validation on the field (things like "required", "valid_url" and "max_length"). There's also code included showing how to edit current posts and listing out the complete post list.

Phil Sturgeon (an expert in all things related to the Fuel PHP framework) has written up a tutorial for NetTuts.com about creating a basic admin panel for your application based on the framework. This is the second part of a series looking at Fuel, building on the topics from the first.

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.

Tom Schlick has a new post to his blog talking about a tool he's written for FuelPHP-based applications called Wrench. It's a command-line tool to make taking your site "offline" simpler.

If you have been following what I've been up to lately you would see that many of my recent projects are based on FuelPHP. Since Fuel is so awesome and allows you to create "packages" that can be dropped into your application, I have created a few that help me quickly piece together apps. The first package I'm "releasing" is called Wrench.

The tool works with the oil command-line tool already included in the framework to swap out the default action with a "Down for Maintenance" message. It will look at the current state of the app and switch it to the opposite when run, but you can also define "start" and "finish" manually if you'd like. You can find the source for the package on Tom's github account.

On the ArsMagnaTutorials YouTube channel has posted three video tutorials (so far) covering the Fuel PHP framework, introducing you to some of the core concepts behind using this powerful framework.

The three videos in the series give an overview of:

• Installation and configuration
• Folders and structure the framework provides
• Controllers, view and using the HTML5 boilerplate.

You can find out more about Fuel on its website and more about the HTML5 Boilerplate here.

On PHPBuilder.com today they have another tutorial that involves the Fuel PHP framework (previously mentioned here). This time, though, they dive in a bit deeper and look at how to create a database-driven application using the database/ORM tools the framework comes bundled with.

In a recent article I introduced the Fuel PHP framework, which shows great promise despite its status as a relative newcomer to the crowded PHP framework market. While hopefully this introductory tutorial helped to acquaint you with fundamental Fuel concepts, it barely scratched the surface in terms of its impressive capabilities, so I thought it would be worthwhile to pen a follow-up article which examines a feature fundamental to almost any web application no matter how small: database integration.

He shows you how to configure your database connection settings, create your first model and work with the "oil" command line application to scaffold out the CRUD of interacting with the model.

Fuel framework users have another option when it comes to user authentication management in their applications. Ando has released Warden, a package that manages logins, password hashing and user ACLs.

Warden is a user database authorization package for the FuelPHP framework that aims to fast track development by handling the work load of uthenticating user's. Built for performance, it comes with a ready-to-use user model and database install script.

The package uses bcrypt for password hashing and also provides features for forgotten passwords, password resets and "remember me" functionality. Installation is as simple as adding it to your "always_load" package list and setting up a few configuration options. Sample code for its features is included. You can get the latest version directly from github.

New on his blog Phil Sturgeon has a post about the social integration package PHP has been dying for - NinjAuth. It has hooks for OAuth and OAuth2 connections and makes it simple to use them completely abstracted.

In the past I have never needed to implement oAuth into a PHP project. I have done it in Rails and boy it was easy thanks to OmniAuth. OmniAuth abstracts away so much of the grunt work that it takes about 5 minutes to add a new social network to your site, and 4 of those minutes are spent signing up for the API keys. What options do we have in the world of PHP? A bunch of screwy hacks or provider specific classes like TwitterOAuth. I don't want to hunt down 20 libraries with different methods, I want to get a key, bang it in and go to the pub. Well, now I can!

The fuel-oauth and fuel-oauth2 packages to drive its backend. He includes a code snippet showing how to configure the providers (complete with keys needed for auth) including Facebook, Flickr, GitHub, YouTube and - of course - Twitter. You can grab the latest version of this library from Phil's github account.

On PHPBuilder.com today Jason Gilmore has a new tutorial showing you how to gets started with the FuelPHP framework, a relatively new framework-on-the-block that will feel familiar for users of CodeIgniter and Kohana.

As it happens, there are even frameworks available for those developers wishing to take advantage of the very latest PHP features such as closures and namespaces. Two such solutions are the aforementioned fat-free microframework and another relative newcomer called Fuel. Although only about 18 months old, the Fuel project has gathered a significant head of steam which powered it all the way through the recent official 1.0 release.

He talks about some of the key features of the framework including its command line tool, oil, and how nicely it plays with the ideas of a RESTful API. He walks you through the installation of the framework and how to create a sample project with oil. He also briefly touches on the default controller, view and templating structure.

On NetTuts.com today there's a new tutorial from Philip Sturgeon about how you can get started with Fuel PHP, a framework for rapid website development.

This two-part tutorial will get you up and running with the Fuel PHP framework. We'll start with the basics, and then move onto some more advanced topics in part two! Let's get started.

He starts with a brief introduction to the Model/View/Controller design pattern just to be sure you're up to speed with the moving parts of the tutorial. From there he walks through installation and the creation of a first "hello world" controller and view. He looks at some of the configuration options the framework includes specifically the database settings. He also points out a handy tool the framework comes with - the "oil" command line tool that makes scaffolding out an application simple. He also talks about database migrations, templating, forms and validation and tasks.