Jon LeMaitre has written up a series of posts talking about effective separation of concerns using Eloquent, the database access component of the Laravel framework. His goal is to show you how makes use of the library and keep your application both maintainable and readable.

Eloquent (and by extension, Laravel) is often criticized because of its ActiveRecord ORM implementation, and that DataMapper produces a cleaner, more maintainable architecture in the long run. [...] This combination of behaviors crammed into a single object in itself is not the problem (in fact, it’s a wonderful asset), the problem is in how you make use of those behaviors throughout your application. You can be sloppy with them, or you can be tidy with them.

He starts with the "sloppy approach" where different methods of accessing the objects (and their data) are spread all across the application. He counters this with the tidy approach that makes use of "persistence-agnostic 'POPOs'" to hide the logic behind repositories. In the second part of the series he starts in and puts this idea into practice, using a simple "Member" table and model and repository classes to abstract the logic. Finally, in part three he gets into some more extended functionality for the repositories approach: handling collections, relations, eager loading and schema changes.