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 PHPClasses.org website has a new book review of SitePoint's latest PHP-related release, "The PHP Anthology: 101 Essential Tips":

As PHP developers, we commonly resort to browsing the Web for people with similar programming problems. Now that we have The PHP Anthology, why should we? While the book certainly does not cover everything, there is something for everyone, and even the few sections you find useful make it all worthwhile.

He talks about the book's target audience, the quality of the examples it provides and some of his suggestions on how the book could have been even better.

Arnold Daniels has a suggestion for developers out there to help improve the performance of their applications - check your loops.

So you have a script which is not performing the way you want to. The first thing you should do it try to find out what the problem is. There are some tools out there that can help you.

He mentions the profiler in Zend Studio as well as the one in XDebug. If you can't install those, however, he has another suggestion - FirePHP (a tool that can help time execution times in a simple and easy to include way.

With tools in hand, he offers a few suggestions as to what to check for and do in your applications:

• Get the data ready before going into the loop
• Don't do things in the loop, you can also do outside it
• Use create_function to aid you
• Be careful with abstraction in loops
• Sometimes you can prevent loops altogether
• Last resort: write an extension

SitePoint publishing has released the Second Edition of their popular PHP Anthology book - "101 Essential Tips, Tricks & Hacks":

Enter, The PHP Anthology a book that proves that you don't need a computer science degree to take advantage of the powerful features of PHP 5.

Save time, and eliminate the frustration of completing PHP tasks, with this comprehensive collection of ready-to-use solutions. If you're building web applications with PHP you'll never let this book out of your sight!

Authors for this edition are PHP notables Ben Balbo, Harry Fuecks, Davey Shafik, Ligaya Turmelle and Matthew Weier O'Phinney. The book covers a huge range of topics like using strings, dates and times, working with files, image manipulation and error handling.

Check out the book's main page for a link to get a free sample of the content, too! You can order the book for either $49.90 USD (PDF and hard copy), $39.95 USD for just the hard copy or $29.95 USD for the PDF copy only.

Check out some blogs from the authors: Matthew Weir O'Phinney, Davey Shafik and Ligaya Turmelle