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).

Damien Seguy has released the latest PHP statistics for last month - April 2008. Among the highlights are things like:

• PHP 5.2.5 is now the most popular PHP version, ahead of 4.4.8
• PHP 5 reaches 36.60% of PHP market share
• Still a lot of migrations toward 5.2.5 and 4.4.8

You can check out the details on these and other statistics (like PHP usage by country and version) the complete monthly stats and the evolution stats. Oh, and don't forget - Damien and crew are the ones supplying the latest edition of the elePHPants to the PHP community!

Lee Blue has posted something looking to bridge yet another gap between Ruby on Rails and PHP - a method for adding before_filter functionality to PHP.

I often use this when implementing a simple login screen for a password protected section of my application. In a Zend Framework application you can implement a preDispatch() function in a Zend_Controller_Action which will run before an action is dispatched. This lets you setup your filter to check to see if the visitor is logged in or not. If the visitor is not logged in, you can redirect them to the login screen of your application.

He includes example code to show its usefulness - checking to see two things: is a user is logged in and to see if they're allowed to use a certain resource.

Ben Ramsey says congratulations to the Costa Rica PHP group on having their first meeting with 37 developers in attendance.

It sounds like they have a very active and vibrant PHP developer community in Costa Rica, and they've found two very supportive universities that have offered to host their meetings and events. I wish that every PHP user group could find sponsors willing to provide computer labs and even bring in outside speakers!

According to the Costa Rica PHP website they had a wonderful response from local developers and found them all eager to contribute however they could. They even have the support of two local universities where they can meet/do work in their labs (even bring in speakers from other countries).

Just a quick note to all of you Twitter-ers out there - we've added our own account you can follow if you'd like to get the latest PHPDeveloper.org news straight to your client (or cellphone):

Just head over to the Twitter site and follow phpdeveloper to get the latest updates. It uses the Twitter Feed website to pull our feed in and push it out, so you'll get the latest updates as they come out.

The admins over on the PHP-GTK Community site have announced a new resource PHP-GTK ircers can take advantage of - a new bot that hangs out in the #php-gtk channel over on the Freenode IRC network with an aim to be as helpful as possible.

The PHP-GTK.eu community site is now host to an IRC bot named Gataka (for "GTK"), helping users on the Freenode IRC channel for PHP-GTK, at irc://irc.freenode.net/php-gtk.

Currently is has an API interface (for PHP-GTK elements), user tracking and the ability to learn factoids. They're even starting to look for input regarding new features (log publication, in this case).

DevShed has posted part two in their series looking at the use of destructors in PHP5. This time they focus on their use with multiple objects inside of an application.

Destructors can be used in all sorts of clever ways in the context of a given PHP 5 application, mostly in those cases where it's necessary to keep track of the status of certain objects prior to their being destroyed by the PHP interpreter. In this second chapter you'll learn how to work simultaneously with multiple classes that concretely implement their respective destructors.

They revisit their previous example with a simple class that's then extended to allow the flexibility to call the same destructor on multiple instances.

Chris Hartjes has followed up on a previous post about user authentication in CakePHP with a few more comments in part two.

I got a question in the comments about my previous post on simple user registration about how to do some of the necessary validation for registration in the model. I thought I'd show some code I did to do exactly that.

He includes the code for his example with the key, he explains, being the use of a second field (the confirm password field) to do the validation.

Stuart Herbert has posted about a very helpful method server admins can use out there to not only help secure their server but possibly make their web hosting users more happy in the long run - using suphp on a shared server (security).

The challenge with securing a shared hosting server is how to secure the website from attack both from the outside and from the inside. [...] This has created a gap that a number of third-party solutions have attempted to fill. One of the oldest of these is suphp, created by Sebastian Marsching.

He works through the whole process - the installation (this is all on a Gentoo linux system), configuring for your Apache install, changing Apache to make it work with suphp and finally some benchmarks and parting comments concerning its use.

DevShed has started up yet another PHP-related series today with this new tutorial covering part of PHP5's object functionality - destructors.

This article, the first part of a five-part series, introduces you to destructors and their use with PHP 5 programs. [...] The word "destructor" relates to certain methods or functions of a determined programming language that are responsible for destroying data that, in the context of that particular language, shouldn't exist any longer.

They create a sample class (for storing user information) and show how to integrate a destructor to remove all traces of the user's information from the properties of the class.