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).

The New Earth Online has a quick look at one easy method for speeding up your site in a few different ways - caching pages and information with things like Cache_Lite and APC.

As your site traffic grows it takes longer and longer to generate a dynamic page from sending multiple queries to a database. One possible solution to limit queries is to cache the result of each query that is needed, or to have a complete full page cache for your site.

They look at the two ways I mentioned - the Cache_Lite PEAR package and the APC extension (that will soon be included by default in the stable PHP releases). Bits of code are provided for each showing how to get them set up and get them working inside of your application.

Michael Girouard has posted his 10,00 foot view of the typical structure of an Model/View/Controller application (and framework) and how a page request is handled:

In my previous article, I announced that I would be documenting the process of developing a simple MVC framework. In this post I will go into a little more detail about each of the specific components of our MVC and will discuss the series of events which occur each time a page loads, otherwise known as the page load scenario.

He talks about how URIs work, the role of mod_rewrite, several of the objects involved (like the Front Controller, Request, Route and View) and how they all fit in with the custom Models, Views and Controllers the user could define.

On his blog, Padraic Brady talks about the creation of custom web pages (in the Zend Framework) with the help of the Zend_View enhancements that have been introduced lately.

With the inclusion of Zend_View Enhanced as first documented, discussed and publicized in this blog series, in the Zend Framework as of 1.5.0 I'd like to thank everyone involved in the process. [...] The main problem of a complex View, is that the current Controller is only aware of a subset of its own required Model (data) and the current View. So how do do you get the View to include extra sections - for example, details from Technorati for your blog - which are common to ALL pages?

Normally, a call to _forward() would have been the norm, but this was more often overly complex for what the developer wanted to do. The new Composite View and View Helpers seem to be the remedy. They make it simpler to grab that information and pull it in without the need to make a whole other framework request to do so.

In a (very) quick note on his blog today Stoyan Stefanov points out that a presentation of his posted over on Slideshare made the front page Featured section (with over 2600 views too!).

Not bad. Especially having in mind that this is the second time around. [...] Slideshare is a great service nevertheless, just like on youtube, you can spend hours browsing people's presentation slides.

The presentation was originally given at the PHP Quebec conference this year (2008).

Chris Hartjes has posted some custom queries that showcase the CakePHP framework's paginaton capabilities:

Okay, so it turns out that the paginate() method that is used to generate the data that you (oddly enough) paginate through takes the same arguments as Model::findAll(). So, if you want to use your own query, you simply create a 'paginate' method for your model.

His queries show the two parts of the equation - fetching the paginated results themselves and grabbing what the current page number is (like "page 7 of 23").

Jonathan Snook has posted about a method he's using to make the creation/use of static pages in a CakePHP application (or website) simpler.

Traditionally in a CakePHP application, to do static pages you have two options: use the built-in Pages controller or set up an empty action in a controller.

Feeling that neither of these two options met how he wanted things to work, Jonathan (and Nate Abele) developed a class that extends the error handler in the CakePHP framework to handle "missing" actions and controllers. This means that, if an unknown controller/action combo is called, this script will check in its correct location (in the structure of the site) and try to find it to render it.

The Nadeau Software site has posted a quick tutorial showing how to grab a remote web page with the help of the cURL extension in PHP.

The first step when building a PHP search engine, link checker, or keyword extractor is to get the web page from the web server. There are several ways to do this. From PHP 4 onwards, the most flexible way to get a web page uses PHP's CURL (Client URL) functions.

They walk through each of the functions the extension enables and include code where needed to show how it all works together.