I am a complete newbie to fuelPHP, but I found it is a very cool framework.
I just changed the "Monkey" example from Oil generate and try to build my own Admin Template which is working really quite good so far.
My problem is now, that $monkey is not tranferred to monkey/_form correctly and I have really no idea why. I also made a new model "animal" and check with the generated code from oil. I only made some changes to that these files are running in my theme now.
You're loading _form using render() from your edit view.
Those are two different Views, each with their own local variable context. A variable set on one view isn't available in another, unless you have used set_global().