On the Script-Tutorials blog today there's a new tutorial posted showing you how to easily add watermarks to your images dynamically, either as a part of a cache generation or on upload.

I will show you how to use GD library. And, main task today is adding watermark to image and generate result as PNG image into browser. We will using PHP and GD library. This is nice library to work with images at server side. Also (as additional tasks) I will draw little frame over image and will draw some text. Between, you can use this method (of adding watermarks in realtime) to protect original photos.

Full code for the script is included in the post, showing the combining of two images into the one finished product. The code is also available for download if you'd like to get hacking right away.

Gonzalo Ayuso has a handy performance tip for getting that little bit extra speed from your page load times - combining Javascript with PHP files.

One of the golden rules when we want a high performance web site is minimize the HTTP requests. Normally we have several JavaScript files within our projects. It's a very good practice to combine all our JavaScript files into an only one file. [...] But if your project is alive and you are changing it, it's helpful to spare your JavaScript files between several files. [...] So we need to choose between high performance and development comfort.

He includes a quick script that runs through your javascript directory (recursively), grabs all of the javascript content from each, combines and minifies them to serve gzip compressed out to the browser.

Noupe.com has posted a list of twenty useful PHP and jQuery components (and tutorials) that could be useful in everyday projects:

When you combine some neat functionality courtesy of PHP with the cleverness of jQuery you can produce some pretty neat effects. In an effort to help you take it up a notch, we'd like to share some methods for helping your site anticipate a user's next move.

Included in the list are components/tutorials like:

• Create a Photo Admin Site Using PHP and jQuery
• PHP ajax login form using Jquery
• Newsletter module
• PHP & jQuery image upload and crop v1.2
• Reddit-style Voting With PHP, MySQL And jQuery

See the full post for even more great PHP+jQuery information.

On the PHP::Impact blog Federico Cargnelutti points out a PHP library that lets you do clustering on Google Maps. What's clustering?

As maps get busier, marker clustering is likely to be needed. Marker clustering is a technique by which several points of interest can be represented by a single icon when they're close to one another.

The tool, created by Mike Tuupola, lets you break up the map into cells and place points inside them. When there's more than one point in a general area, an extra icon is created to reference those points together (cleaning up the map and preventing you from having lot of little Google Maps markers cluttering up your map. Mike also has a blog post about the library showing it in a bit more detail.

Since the Zend Framework is mostly a library of components behind a framework structure, its parts can also be used individually if need be. In this new post Matt Stone shows how to combine the Zend_Acl component (for access control) with a CodeIgniter framework application.

In this post I will explain how to build simple access control functionality for your Code Igniter application using the Zend Framework ACL library. To follow this tutorial you will need a working installation of Code Igniter and a database. You will also need to download the Zend Framework.

He goes through the whole process - code and all - for pulling in and using the Zend_Acl library complete with a database (schema and inserts provided) as well as a sample controller for CodeIgniter to test things out.

John Highland has a quick tutorial showing how to create a lifestream with PHP out of all of the RSS feeds surrounding the multiple social networking and blogging sites you have out there (with the help of SimplePie).

Its not secret, I love social networking, I cant get enough of it. I also love programming and anything internet related. I'm not sure how I came across it, but a PHP based, Object Oriented RSS caching tool named SimplePie caught my attention.

SimplePie offers one piece of functionality that he found particularly useful - the ability to merge RSS feeds easily. He took advantage of the ability and pulled together his Twitter, Flickr, Pownce, Digg and Youtube RSS feeds to make one mega-feed. You can see an example of it in action over on his personal site.

On the Zend Developer Zone, a new tutorial has been posted that anyone looking to "blend feeds" might want to take a look at. It's a guide to using the Zend_Feed component of the Zend Framework to combine the contents of multiple RSS feeds.

As part of my playing around with the Zend Framework, I've decided to make this merged RSS feed using the Zend_Feed component. Actually at the end I've realized that this merged feed idea is quite useless, but at least this post came out of it :-)

He developed it originally as a way to combine his twitter and blog feeds into one thing to provide the latest updates to readers from both in one simple place. He shows how to take in the two feeds, each in its own feed object and merge them into one array. This array is then pushed back out to the visitor an the RSS format (thanks to Zend_Feed_Rss).

On his blog Jan Lehnardt has posted an alternative method for using the Code Igniter framework together with the Zend Framework with only the parts you need.

I want to use Code Igniter for some applications and I want to use some bits of the Zend Framework inside my Code Igniter classes. There is a tutorial explaining how to set it up. But there is a problem.

He reverses the method the other tutorial uses and chooses to go with Code Igniter for the application logic side of things, making use of the helper and autoload functionality of CodeIgniter to pull things together. He includes code to make his method clear.

The PHP Geek points out an older article concerning the combination of two of the major PHP frameworks - CakePHP and the Zend Framework.

I am sure you already heard about the Zend framework. It provides some nice components (don't confuse them with Cake components) for which there are no equivalents in the core of CakePHP. Due to the flexibility of CakePHP it is relatively easy to use these Zend components within a CakePHP application (be aware that the Zend Framework requires PHP5).

The tutorial is a simple five step process where the only difficult part is adding in the correct include path information in the Zend_Feed component.

This new entry on Ryan Grove's blog today points out a handy little tool written in PHP that can be used to (somewhat) reduce the time it takes for your pages to download.

Minify is a PHP library that attempts to fix this problem by combining multiple CSS or JavaScript files into one download. By default, it also removes comments and unnecessary whitespace to decrease the amount of data that must be sent to the browser. Most importantly, it does all of this on the fly and requires only a few simple changes to your existing web pages.

He gives a before and after example of the things it can do - mainly combining multiple tags (like link and script) and their information into one. Check out its page on the Google Code site for more information.