We are pleased to announce the October event for PHP North East, an introduction to Fuel PHP.

The event will take place at the Post Office in Pink Lane (@PostOfficeNE1) courtesy of PNE.  Thanks to the generous sponsorship of Laura Sharpe of Sharpe Recruitment, there will once again be a stack of pizzas for you to enjoy before the talk.  The event is free and open to all, but please sign up online so that we have an idea of numbers for the venue, and how much Laura needs to cough up for the pizzas.  Feedback, suggestions and ideas for future topics are welcome on our Google Group.

Please promote this event via Twitter or your own website to help us spread the word.

Fuel PHP - Phil Sturgeon

PHP is the land of a thousand frameworks and sometimes it can be hard to see which framework you should use and why. Some of them are old, some are over-complicated, some are barely ever updated and some are re-coded so often you're scared to get involved as by the time you've finished the app you'll need a rewrite to support the latest API.

The PHP community has always had an approach of "I'm going to pick my favourite stick and then beat everybody else with it" and it can often be hard to move away from this age old "fighting on the internets" approach of fanboyism, but really anybody who is using a framework should be interested in one thing: 

    Getting the job done quickly and neatly.

I have used several frameworks and often find myself hacking and extending core files, guessing how things work based on un-commeted or un-documented code or lost in seas of blog articles trying to work out whats going on. It's at times like this you wonder if you should be using a framework at all, or maybe you should just switch to another, and another, and another...

Well there is a relatively new contender on the market by the name of Fuel PHP and I am proud to be part of the team. The project is an attempt to stem all of these issues by letting the community have a much much bigger say in the development of the framework from day 1 and learning from the lessons of existing frameworks.

We've kept the simplicity of CodeIgniter, learned from the wonderfully flexible file structure of Kohana, developed some command line utilities along the lines of Rails giving us interactive debugging, database migrations and configurable code scaffolding and generation, and added a whole load of new ideas. Fuel has been a real mixing ground for people to implement the best ideas possible in a new way and we've been lucky enough to have core contributors and users from several other frameworks get involved to help get around common frustrations in other systems and implement new ideas that would require too much change to their systems to be viable.

This talk won't be me trying to "sell my wares", but an interesting look into some of the features, some of the decisions made along the way and the benefits of allowing a project to be fully community orientated from day 1.