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.

Phil Sturgeon has put together a screencast showing off a few of the features of the Fuel PHP framework like migrations, tasks and the console the Oil tool provides.

In this video I'm going to be demonstrating migrations which I touched on in the last video but I felt I should go into them in more depth. Migrations [...] are essentially a way to stage changes for your database in a way that means the changes can be independent from the schema as a whole.

He walks you through the creation of a migration with the help of the Oil command line tool. The generated classes include "up" and "down" methods for the creation and rollback of your changes. He shows the process to create a simple task and how to use the built-in console to interactively work with the framework. You can find out more about Fuel on the Fuel documentation section of the project's site.