The SitePoint PHP blog has started off a new series this morning to help you create a custom Laravel application based on the 500px photo community site. In this first part of the series they help you get the application up and running and connected to the 500px API.

500px is a photo community for discovering, sharing, buying and selling inspiring photography. In this article we are going to explore their API and build a small showcase app. Let’s get started.

You'll need to have Laravel set up and working to get started on the tutorial, but they help you get the other libraries installed and configured (like Guzzle). They start with getting a list of the most popular photos from the API, connecting it to your account via an OAuth token. A base route is created and connected to a controller/action with a view to render each of the photos in their own divs. They then add in a bit of Javascript to create a "Load More" button that makes another call, with pagination, to pull in more photo details. Finally they show you how to create the user profile page, grabbing user information and related photos and rendering them out to a page.

NetTuts.com has published a few more WordPress tips and best practices to help you get the most out of your WordPress-based application.

Welcome to the second part of the series. In the first article, we explained the WordPress Coding Standards, how to avoid namespaces collisions, comments in the code, and some basic security tips. Today, we are going to go a bit deeper and write some more code and learn some techniques to improve performance and security of our plugins.

They look specifically at when you should include your scripts and styles, formatting Ajax calls and working with filters and actions. Code snippets are included with each point with links to some other resources for some of the topics to provide more information.

Following up his previous post on the subject, Pierre has post number two about some of the new features that GD in 5.1.x has.

With the png compression, I also forgot the couple of filters added in php5 some months ago. Like any additions after php 5.0, they have been added to the HEAD, which happens to 5.1.x now. The convolution I presented yesterday is one of them.

A simple list of the current filters: negate, grayscale, brightness, contrast, colorize, edgedetect (convolution), emboss (convolution), gaussian blur (convolution), selective blur, mean removal (convolution), smooth (convolution).

He also includes some samples of what can be done with each filter on a variety of subjects...

Following up his previous post on the subject, Pierre has post number two about some of the new features that GD in 5.1.x has.

With the png compression, I also forgot the couple of filters added in php5 some months ago. Like any additions after php 5.0, they have been added to the HEAD, which happens to 5.1.x now. The convolution I presented yesterday is one of them.

A simple list of the current filters: negate, grayscale, brightness, contrast, colorize, edgedetect (convolution), emboss (convolution), gaussian blur (convolution), selective blur, mean removal (convolution), smooth (convolution).

He also includes some samples of what can be done with each filter on a variety of subjects...