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).

If you're a WordPress user and are in the process of an upgrade from PHP4 to PHP5, you might be having a few issues. One problem can be cause by the wp-cache component and this recent post from Shantanu Goel.

The issues range from weird page layouts, to some controls not working, to some errors popping up here and there, and probably your blog not even displaying. This occurs because even though WordPress is PHP5 compatible, some of the plugins you are using might not be.

In his case, it was the wp-cache plugin that was causing the problems. Permissions weren't right to allow it to do its job. This resulted in problems rendering content and with the site acting as it normally would. His solution involved disabling and reenabling the plugin after deleting the cache and lock file the plugin uses.

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

For all of you putting off making the upgrade to WordPress 5, Cal Evans' story might be just that last push you need to take the plunge.

I now run WordPress on 4 of my web properties. So let me first say a big thank you to the entire WordPress development community for all their work. [...] In the process of installing and managing these properties, I've learned just a little bit about WordPress and decided that I had better document some of it before it falls out the back of my head.

He steps through the details his install including his pre-install steps, the installation and configuration of the software (including Akismet, SimepleTags, the All in One SEO plugin and interfaces with FeedBurner and a Friend Feed).

On the Developer Tutorials blog, there's a new post showing you what all you'll need to install to work with WordPress offline "like a pro" on your local machine.

I used to work off of my web server but the problem I've had lately is that when I'm not connected to the internet I haven't been able to code for Wordpress in a way that allows me to view my changes. Since I started using the techniques used in this tutorial my productivity has increased significantly.

His method has you install MAMP on your local machine (for the Windows users, WAMP is just about as easy to set up) and how to import content over from your remote server to the local machine. Of course, you could just set up a subversion repository, but that's another tutorial...

Ed Finkler, not normally a big fan of the WordPress PHP-based blogging system, has pointed out some positive steps that were made in the latest release in the security arena.

Anyone who gets me liquored up knows that I'm not a fan of Wordpress. I think it's great from a user (that is, the person writing the content) standpoint, but it has lagged behind severely in terms of security, and I don't believe its popularity is the sole reason WP has been the subject of dozens of vulnerability reports every year. That being said, the WP 2.5 release appears to offer significant improvements in a couple areas: password hashes and cookie data encryption.

He mentions two things in particular - their addition of salted passwords and secure cookies.

On his blog today, Stefan Mischook has posted his take on some of the killer PHP projects that are out there:

Part of PHP's power is actually found in the variety of open source (free to use) PHP based applications. I'm talking about things like blogs, web frameworks, forums, CMS' etc. I was just thinking, that a list of 'killer' PHP open source projects would be useful

There four on his list so far - WordPress, the Zend Framework, Drupal and Punbb.

To be totally honest about it, we've seen much of the good stuff coming out of the PHP world, in the last few years. PHP developers are leap-frogging ahead with regards to their level of skill and the quality of code they produce.

The WordPress blog has posted a sneak peek of the upcoming release of the popular blogging tool - WordPress 2.5.

A customizable dashboard, multi-file upload, built-in galleries, one-click plugin upgrades, tag management, built-in Gravatars, full text feeds, and faster load times sound interesting? Then WordPress 2.5 might be the release for you. It’s been in the oven for a while, and we’re finally ready to open the doors a bit to give you a taste.

They look at each of these - the new Dashboard, updates to the Write page and the changes to the Manage page. If you want to get a jump on the action before the stable release, go grab the latest Release Candidate and get going.

Scott Klarr has pulled together a listing of the top cheat sheets that he's found out there relating to PHP (and things surrounding it) like:

• this one from blueshoes.org
• a sheet covering filtering and escaping
• a Smarty cheat sheet
• a few covering WordPress
• and ones covering CakePHP and Drupal

Check out his page for more (and thumbnails for each).

On the ProDevTips blog today, Henrik has posted about an alternative to the popular Akismet plugin for the PHP blogging tool, WordPress, to help prevent even more comment spam from making it past - WP_Hashcash.

WP Hashcash is an antispam plugin that eradicates comment spam on Wordpress blogs. It works because your visitors must use obfuscated javascript to submit a proof-of-work that indicates they opened your website in a web browser, not a robot.

He includes the code that he needed to change to get the widget part of the plugin up and working correctly. You can find out more about this plugin from its page on Elliot Back's blog.