The Developer Tutorials blog has a new post full of links to some great add-ons for the popular WordPress blogging software to help make your site into more of a community.

Wordpress is a CMS that was built for blogging but many people have repurposed it for magazines, newspapers, blog networks and all sorts of other goodies! But did you know you can hack your Wordpress blog to be a no-cost solution for a social network? Well you can, and here's fifteen plug-ins that will let you do it.

Some of the packages they link to include Ajaxd WordPress, Profiles, Quick SMS, Invite Friends and SezWho.

As posted on Ben Ramsey's blog (and released out through the PHP community) - a press release about PHP Groups:

PHP Groups, a worldwide network for PHP user groups, launched today with the intent to foster an open community for PHP user groups to share and exchange ideas and information. Membership is open to anyone working with a PHP user group or interested in starting one.

At present, PHP Groups provides a mailing list where user group leaders and those interested may subscribe and take part in a dialog with other user groups. "I hope that part of our accomplishments will involve uniting and bringing together for an open dialog all of the PHP user groups across the world," said Ramsey. "I hope this mailing list can get that conversation going."

If you're interested in the project and want to get involved, check out their mailing list and website to get complete details.

There's a tutorial over on mpwebwizard.com that's been updated and talks about using a mirror to handle hits from a popular website (like digg or slashdot).

caching services such as coral content distribution network provide an alternative for when your site goes down, but why wait until it gets to that stage? why not just send all your hits from high-end websites to the coral cache version? well, there isn't a good reason not to, so i'll show you how to do it automatically.

He provides the simple script that looks for certain sites in the "HTTP_REFERER" value of incoming calls and pushes them off to the cached location with a header() redirect. The whole thing is only 12 lines, not counting the $sites array.

Both Ben Ramsey and Elizabeth Naramore have commented on the new IRC channel they've formed for the upcoming PHP Appalachia conference on the Freenode network.

We now have an IRC channel for the PHP Appalachia conference - Freenode - #phpappalachia. Come join us!

You can access the Freenode network with any IRC client and can join in on the channel at any time. Come find out others who are coming and get the latest on the conference.

DevShed finishes off their "Creating a Query Processor" series, a look at working with sockets and related functions, in part three, a focus on extending the class even further and some more in-depth looks "under the hood".

Welcome to the third part of the series "Network Programming in PHP." In three tutorials, this series explains the basics of network programming in PHP, by developing a query processor class in PHP 5, which uses some of the most popular PHP network functions, in order to implement the logic of its methods.

In this last article of the series, I'll add some extra methods to the query processor class, which can be used for performing the networking operations that I mentioned before. Of course, I'll implement within all the methods an easy-to-grasp programming logic, so you shouldn't have any problems understanding how each method works.

He starts with a brief look back to see how far the script's come before charging ahead into even more expansion. He fleshes out the getMXRecords and checkDNSRecords methods before adding in come TCP service functions - scanPort and getWhois. Finally, he wraps it all back into the class and takes one last look at the entire creation (and a simple example that checks the DNS and scans ports for the host "google.com".

DevShed has posted the second part of their "Network Programming in PHP" series today - this time, they enhance the QueryProcessor class they've developed with even more functionality.

At this point I guess that all the networking PHP built-in functions that I covered in the first article, such as the "gethostbyaddr()", "gethostbyname()", "gethostbynamel()" functions are already familiar to you. So now I will explain what new things you'll learn in this second article of the series. Since I want to continue expanding the "QueryProcessor" class that I coded previously, this installment will focus on adding more methods to it, by using other useful PHP network functions, aimed particularly at running popular Windows networking applications, like "ipconfig," "netstat" and more.

If you didn't get a change to check out part one, it's definitely suggested that you do so before you start on this section. As mentioned, they're going to show you how to add other functionality to the class, including the ability to ping another server, check the current machine's network settings, perform a "netstat" command, and get the MX records for a hostname. At the end, they stick it all together in the complete (so far) class for easy cut and paste.

In an effort to create a higher level of discussion on PHP than just the "why is this erroring?" or "how do I get PHP to..." questions, Davey Shafik has started a new channel over on the Freenode IRC network to futher talks about PHP and not just fixing other peoples errors.

Now, I really love helping people, but it's nice to get something back once in a while. So, I've decided to start a spin-off channel, one that does promote the things I want to talk about - and hopefully others do to. Join #php.thinktank on irc.freenode.net and lets talk about things.

The goal of the channel is to foster talks about topics such as design patterns, emerging PHP concepts, working on the bleeding edge, and new ways of doing old things. The channel is already set up and running smooth with users constantly around (though they might be just lurking), so come on over and join in.

Jim Plush has released the latest version of his My-Bic Ajax/PHP framework with a few cool enhancements - version 0.6 according to this new post.

The two major features added are JSON client side encoding and network down handling. Client side JSON encoding will allow you to send more complex structures to your PHP script and they can get converted to normal PHP objects. The other major feature is handling network down issues.

For example if your client script cannot get a response back from the server My-Bic will now allow you to define your own network down function or you can use the default method which creates a div on the screen alerting the user of network issues. If there are 3 requests that fail in a row My-Bic disables itself until the page is reloaded. All of those settings are configurable so you can change or override them.

The addition of these two features is definitely a plus for the framework - they provide two more advanced features that any developer can use thanks to the simplicity of the My-Bic framework. Some of the other features of the framework include easy forms, a built-in submission queue, and a bit to help you in debugging your scripts.

On the Oracle Technology Network today, there's this new tutorial that covers the rapid creation of PHP applications with the help of the Achievo ATK PHP application framework.

In this article, you will learn the power of this combination by using the open source Achievo ATK PHP application framework to build a Web application on top of an existing Oracle database. Using the venerable scott schema as an example, you will see how to build a Web application with full CRUD (create, read, update, delete) support for managing employees and departments in just a few steps and in fewer than 100 lines of code.

The tutorial introduces the framework and leads you through how to get it all installed on your (Linux/Unix or Windows) system. From there, it's all code - creating the initial module, adding nodes to perform actions, and linking them together with relations in the data.