If you're a wordpress power user, you'll inevitably have some questions about how you can improve your blog or add new features. Here are five tips that will make life easier for people wanting to maximize their use of Wordpress.

The list is:

• Quickly Find Page/Post ID
• Custom Front Page
• Password Protect Wordpress
• Protect from the 'Digg Efect' with HTML
• Stop Hackers

Each of them with their own explanations (and links to other resources detailing how they're done).

PHP is a loosely typed language. Most of the time this is very useful because you as a programmer don't have to worry about typecasting: it's done for you. However, on some occasions this can cause some unexpected trouble. [...] In this blog I want to point out what can happen if you try to access object properties by reference when the object is not initialized.

His example shows the problem when it tries to grab a value from an array in a non-existent object by reference. It results in a dyanamically created object (of that type) with an empty array inside of it. It only works when you grab it by reference, but he shares a tip or two about how you can prevent hard to track down issues like this.

You may use any built in function, the phpinfo() of the server used for testing will be attached. You just need to retrieve the links, you don't need to worry about them being relative or absolute.

It should be able to be called from the command line and return the links, one per line. They include how the scripts will be measured (speed, accuracy, etc) and the prize list - $100 gift card for phparch.com, a one year subscription or *drum roll* an autographed picture of ProPHP podcast hosts Paul Reinheimer and Sean Coates.

To submit your entry just email it over to c7ycontests@phparch.com with the subject of "C7Y Contest - February" on it.

I've made a previus post on SPL using RecursiveIterator to parse Array. Today we will use this same RecursiveIterator with a DirectoryRecursiveIterator.

The code is pretty simple and straight forward - a DirectorySearch class that takes in the directory name and recurses through the files and subdirectories to locate the file you're looking for.

Many position-based boards are full of employers who don’t understand the value of quality code. [...] There are really only two ways to find a decent PHP job, then: find freelance projects from clients that will pay for your expertise, or get a full time job. Here are some good destinations for each.

Their suggestions are broken up into two different categories - freelance or waged. The freelance list includes Elance and PHP-Freelancers while their waged list includes the Zend Job Board and the PHPJobs.com website.