On the SitePoint PHP blog today they've posted a new tutorial that reintroduces you to FuelPHP, the framework that was (sort of) the successor to the CodeIgniter framework. It was started by some of the ex-CI developers in an effort to make a more robust, yet simple PHP framework for PHP 5.3+.

As a PHP developer, I have been a consistent user of different PHP frameworks, mostly focusing on CakePHP. Recently, I felt the need to go framework shopping and I have many valid reasons for choosing FuelPHP. It has a built-in modular structure and complete flexibility with emphasis on community. Before Fuel, I was a CakePHP user and just like Cake, Fuel is a huge community driven framework.

The author walks you through the installation process (via the framework's own "oil" command line tool) and dives into some example code quickly after that. He shows how to create a simple "Hello World" route and generate the scaffolding (code generation for the MVC pieces) including migrations. He creates a simple "users" table and adds some authentication checking to the controller. Then in the view he sets up a simple login form, requesting username and password and outputting any errors that might pop up during the authentication process.

On the CodeBlog they've posted a review of a recent release from Packt Publishing about using the FuelPHP framework for beginners.

I’ve been playing around with FuelPHP for a while and despite the fact that I haven’t used it in production, it has been on my watch list ever since I first saw it. When I saw the new book about FuelPHP by Ross Tweedie, I was eager to read it – here’s my feedback about. If you just want to buy the book, you can get it at Amazon or directly from Packt Publishing.

The review looks at each chapter and provides an overview of its contents (seven of them). It also talks some about the target audience for the book - intermediate to advanced PHP developers wanting to learn more about the framework. To be clear, this is not an "introduction to PHP" book too. He points out some of the "bads" about the book including major concepts being explained too high-level and confusion about what exactly to do in certain steps of the process.

Should I read this book? It depends on your background – I wouldn’t recommend it if you’re a PHP programmer who hasn’t worked with namespaces, databases before. [...] I’d definitely recommend to book if you worked with other frameworks like CodeIgniter, Yii, Zend .. before and now want to have a look at FuelPHP. You’ll get a good impression about its possibilities!

On the CodeBlog they've posted a review of a recent release from Packt Publishing about using the FuelPHP framework for beginners.

I’ve been playing around with FuelPHP for a while and despite the fact that I haven’t used it in production, it has been on my watch list ever since I first saw it. When I saw the new book about FuelPHP by Ross Tweedie, I was eager to read it – here’s my feedback about. If you just want to buy the book, you can get it at Amazon or directly from Packt Publishing.

The review looks at each chapter and provides an overview of its contents (seven of them). It also talks some about the target audience for the book - intermediate to advanced PHP developers wanting to learn more about the framework. To be clear, this is not an "introduction to PHP" book too. He points out some of the "bads" about the book including major concepts being explained too high-level and confusion about what exactly to do in certain steps of the process.

Should I read this book? It depends on your background – I wouldn’t recommend it if you’re a PHP programmer who hasn’t worked with namespaces, databases before. [...] I’d definitely recommend to book if you worked with other frameworks like CodeIgniter, Yii, Zend .. before and now want to have a look at FuelPHP. You’ll get a good impression about its possibilities!

On the Pro Developer site today there's a new post looking at the past and future of FuelPHP a framework started by Dan Horigan and Phil Sturgeon (who have both since left the team).

FuelPHP was first framework which used namespaces and was production ready at the same time. Small footprint, flexibility, namespaces, modularity and other gears make this framework great for building web applications. [...] For FuelPHP team 2012 was year with ups and downs. Dan Horigan was not available for his team members few months and no one didn’t know where he was. He show up on the twitter and then he was unreachable again. WanWizard (Harro Verton) and Jelmer Schreuder were most active at the building FuelPHP core and they done a great job.

He takes a look at the road ahead (FuelPHP v2) and the work that's already been done on it. He also notes that another of the core team members has left the FuelPHP development group a few days ago and that there were some things about the framework he no longer liked. The post suggests looking into something like Laravel (v4, not yet released) if you're shopping for a new framework. He does note that, while the future of FuelPHP may be rocky, it is a stable framework and is still a solid choice for a platform (especially if it's already in use).

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.