On the Developer Tutorials Blog today, there's a new post aimed at WordPress users to help them on the path to becoming "power users" with five tips.

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).

So you've seen all of the pictures of the elePHPants floating around and want to get your hands on one of your very own? Good news! Damien Seguy and crew have another fresh batch of huggable blue PHPness on the way and you can place your order now:

If you have missed the boat of the first generation of elePHPants, now is the right time to catchup up and participate to the 2008 generation! As for the first generation, this project is open to every PHP User group and aficionados, that want to adopt elePHPants, small or big.

Pricing is 4 Euros per elephant (in a 50 count box only) or 50 Euro for one of the larger elephants. They're even open to having company logos ("your own brood") added to the other side of his back. You can find more details on getting your hands on one at this page on the Nexen.net website or just head right to the order form to get a little blue PHPer to call your own.

The Developer Tutorials blog has posted a series they've worked up to show bloggers out there running WordPress how to create a custom theme from scratch:

In this multi-part series I'll detail how to create and design a Wordpress theme from nothing more than your imagination using Photoshop, CSS, XHTML and PHP.

Here's the list so far:

• Part 1 - getting the tools and an overall layout idea
• Part 2 - splitting it up to make the layout parts
• Part 3 - converting the Photoshop template to XHTML
• Part 4 - cleaning up the XHTML and doing some styling with CSS
• Part 5 - how to preload some images with Javascript to make the page load faster
• Part 6 - creating the WordPress-specific markup
• Part 7 - working up the PHP functionality
• Part 8 - integrating PHP into the template
• Part 9 - marking up the "framework" of the site (header/footer/sidebar)
• Part 10 - adding additional files like a links page and changing the posting template
• Part 11 (?) - deploying the theme out to the public view

On DevShed today, there's a new article in their series looking at creating custom functions to handle file uploads in your application:

I'm going to show you how to wrap the file uploading application built in the previous article of the series into a single custom PHP function. This will turn it into a more maintainable and reusable piece of code.

They review the source built in previous parts of the series and show how to update it with a uploadFile() function that takes all of the logic from before (exceptions and all) and wraps it up into a nice little package that can be reused anywhere.

A while back Mathew Turland posted a guide for getting a custom version of PHP compiled on a Windows machine.

At the encouragement of Elizabeth Smith, I went through the process (not-so-recently as of this blog entry) of compiling PHP on Windows.

He gives his "laundry list" of things to download/have access to and the link to Elizabeth's tutorial handy. Matthew found a few differences in his compile - an issue with IPv6 support and a pathing problem with the scripts trying to find libmysql.dll. He also throws in his instructions on getting aspell support compiled in.

Besides all of the usual Valentines day logo fun from some of the major sites out there, Paul Reinheimer also points out a special little something on the Funcaday.com website:

Want a custom one to share with someone you care about. Fill out the form here. It's a subtle effect though, they'll need to read it. Valid characters for names are just alphabetics and the underscore, sorry.

The custom output is a great little addition to the site - put in person one's name and person two's name and it updates the image to show the new parameters. Ah, geek love...

Rob Allen has posted about a small modification that he made to his Zend Framework setup that allows for a little safer echoing of information out to the View later of an application.

One of my biggest issues with using PHP as the templating engine in View scripts is that the easiest way to echo a variable is the least secure. [...] So, I decided to leverage a post by Mike Naberezny from a while ago about streams. The idea is all his; I just modified it to work with Zend Framework's Zend_View the way I wanted it to.

His method uses a slightly different output format - instead of using a normal echo statement to push out the escaped output, it uses a special syntax using the "@" sign as a shortcut to the call to escape(). He includes the code you'll need to make it work in your ZF install and explain it a bit (including where the real key lies - in stream_popen).

On the {H{Riot.com site today, there's a new tutorial talking about how to customize your site's Smarty templates a bit more using external plug-ins, specifically one for making those "code block" sections seen all over the web.

We will first learn how block plug-ins can be used in your templates, and then learn how to create our own. Once we know how to create a block plug-in, we will cover a practical example that will show you how block plug-ins can effectively be used in your own web sites.

The tutorial assumes that you already have Smarty installed and that you're familiar enough with it to know how to work with the plug-in system right away. They include some samples of how it can be used (a default block, formatting it with HTML) and, of course, how to integrate this (PHP code and all) into your template and push your content into it.

The PHP Web Services blog has a helpful hint on getting a custom SOAP request all ready to go:

How do you get this [custom] XML to be output by the SoapClient?

Using the SoapVar method and a few newly created objects, making a custom structure is simple. It's just a matter of encoding the object and setting it with the base() method in the PHP SOAP extension. Check out the blog post for an example of both the custom XML and the code to produce it.

Leo Buttiker has posted a release announcement about the new framework they've developed - Trevi.

There're already thousands of web frameworks out there so I would sink into the ground if we really wrote another one. [...] Zend Framework looked like a nice solution. But what we probably liked most is that ZF allowed us to replace every component in the framework.

To this end, their "framework" isn't truly a new way of doing things - it's just a heavily modified version of the Zend Framework they've customized to fit their needs. Trevi is their own internal name for this release.