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 5.2.5 is now the most popular PHP version, ahead of 4.4.8
• PHP 5 reaches 36.60% of PHP market share
• Still a lot of migrations toward 5.2.5 and 4.4.8

You can check out the details on these and other statistics (like PHP usage by country and version) the complete monthly stats and the evolution stats. Oh, and don't forget - Damien and crew are the ones supplying the latest edition of the elePHPants to the PHP community!

I often use this when implementing a simple login screen for a password protected section of my application. In a Zend Framework application you can implement a preDispatch() function in a Zend_Controller_Action which will run before an action is dispatched. This lets you setup your filter to check to see if the visitor is logged in or not. If the visitor is not logged in, you can redirect them to the login screen of your application.

He includes example code to show its usefulness - checking to see two things: is a user is logged in and to see if they're allowed to use a certain resource.

It sounds like they have a very active and vibrant PHP developer community in Costa Rica, and they've found two very supportive universities that have offered to host their meetings and events. I wish that every PHP user group could find sponsors willing to provide computer labs and even bring in outside speakers!

According to the Costa Rica PHP website they had a wonderful response from local developers and found them all eager to contribute however they could. They even have the support of two local universities where they can meet/do work in their labs (even bring in speakers from other countries).

Just head over to the Twitter site and follow phpdeveloper to get the latest updates. It uses the Twitter Feed website to pull our feed in and push it out, so you'll get the latest updates as they come out.

The PHP-GTK.eu community site is now host to an IRC bot named Gataka (for "GTK"), helping users on the Freenode IRC channel for PHP-GTK, at irc://irc.freenode.net/php-gtk.

Currently is has an API interface (for PHP-GTK elements), user tracking and the ability to learn factoids. They're even starting to look for input regarding new features (log publication, in this case).

Destructors can be used in all sorts of clever ways in the context of a given PHP 5 application, mostly in those cases where it's necessary to keep track of the status of certain objects prior to their being destroyed by the PHP interpreter. In this second chapter you'll learn how to work simultaneously with multiple classes that concretely implement their respective destructors.

They revisit their previous example with a simple class that's then extended to allow the flexibility to call the same destructor on multiple instances.

I got a question in the comments about my previous post on simple user registration about how to do some of the necessary validation for registration in the model. I thought I'd show some code I did to do exactly that.

He includes the code for his example with the key, he explains, being the use of a second field (the confirm password field) to do the validation.

The challenge with securing a shared hosting server is how to secure the website from attack both from the outside and from the inside. [...] This has created a gap that a number of third-party solutions have attempted to fill. One of the oldest of these is suphp, created by Sebastian Marsching.

He works through the whole process - the installation (this is all on a Gentoo linux system), configuring for your Apache install, changing Apache to make it work with suphp and finally some benchmarks and parting comments concerning its use.