On PHPBuilder.com today there's a new tutorial walking you through the creation of a simple WordPress plugin that shows the latest YouTube video from your blog's channel.

Think of plugins as components where you put your functionality and widgets as components of your user interface. Building your own WordPress plugins and widgets will make your blog truly original, and all you need is basic PHP and HTML knowledge - and your imagination.

They help you get started with defining a few constants, registering the actions with WordPress, building the widget (with complete cut-and-paste-able code) and including it in your WordPress blog. You can download the complete source if you want to get started quickly.

In a new post to his blog Matthew Weier O'Phinney looks at creating reusable plugins for the Zend_Application component of the Zend Framework. This is a follow-up from his previous article introducing Zend_Application.

What happens when you need a re-usable resource for which there is no existing plugin shipped? Why, write your own, of course! All plugins in Zend Framework follow a common pattern. Basically, you group plugins under a common directory, with a common class prefix, and then notify the pluggable class of their location.

His example shows a plugin that can set the doctype of the view you're using and set the default page title and the separator. He mentions things like the framework's coding/naming standards, dependency tracking, setting up the configuration and, finally, doing the two actions laid out at the start. A few simple lines added to the application.ini file and you're all set to start using the new plugin.

On the WeblogTools Collection blog today there's a new post from Ronald Huereca with a tip about manually turning off and on your WordPress plugins if you get into a bind and need more than the web-based interface can do.

There may be times in WordPress where you would like to load the WordPress environment manually, and prevent plugins from loading. [...] To further give justification for this technique, I had a major plugin conflict with another plugin. My Ajax Edit Comments plugin had failed to work for one of my clients. After doing some troubleshooting, I determined it was a plugin conflict with "xyz" plugin.

He admits that the technique is a "hack" but can be quite useful in the right situations. The process involves changing your wp-settings file to define the "WP_INSTALLING" constant then the plugins can be manually loaded as needed instead of automatically. This can help narrow down where an issue is (sometimes) faster than enabling/disabling them and guessing.

In this new post to his blog Adam Jensen looks at creating cron jobs with the help of the Zend Framework without having to load up the entire MVC architecture to get there.

So, we're going to need a new application bootstrap and entry point, one that eschews the MVC routing and dispatch process in favor of something simpler. Essentially, all we'll need is to be able to run an arbitrary collection of cron "task plugins," the list of which can be configured in plain text via any of the various Zend_Config formats (e.g., the default application.ini file).

He starts with the base functionality, a task plugin interface that allows you to set up a "framework" to run the tasks in. He also creates a simple cron service that handles the execution of the tasks (this is the main executable) and includes the code for creating the bootstrap for the Zend Framework to understand how to use it all. Then to create a new task, all you have to do is extend the CronInterface.

Dougal Campbell would like to suggest something to all of the WordPress and WordPress plugin developers out there to help make things clearer - namspacing for the options in the database.

I happened to be poking around in my database a while ago, particularly in the WordPress 'options' table for this blog. There's an awful lot of cruft hanging around from old plugins that I don't use anymore. I cleaned a few things out, but something hit me as I was perusing all those options: I can't always tell which options belong(ed) to which plugins, themes, or to the WordPress core.

He suggests that plugin developers use some sort of namespacing in their column/table names to help keep things split out a bit more from the core and from other plugins. This keeps those maintaining the site from having to dig into the code just to figure out what's associated. He lists a few advantages and disavantages to the approach, including both making it easir to find them but adding complexity in their use.

On the webm.org site today there's a new post with a list of ten plugins that you can use to help improve the security of your WordPress installation.

In today's modern world it certainly pays to be security conscious, regularly backing up your database is a good start, but what is even better is having some mechanisms in place to hopefully prevent it getting that far. Here are 10 plugins that will help secure your Wordpress install and keep your hard work safe and hopefully keep the hackers away,

Their list includes plugins like:

• Admin SSL
• Login LockDown WordPress Security
• Secure WordPress
• WP Security Scan

With some of the recent announcements about the future of CodeIgniter and Expression Engine opinions have been coming out all over including this one from Elliot Haughin about a potential change in the Expression Engine market.

If you're a CodeIgniter developer I would say this: You WILL be able to develop ExpressionEngine addons, plugins, as if you were just coding away in a CodeIgniter development. And this is where the 3rd party ExpressionEngine market will start going crazy.

He suggests that, while the EE development market has been largely dominate by a select few companies, that could be about to change. Any development group that's already familiar with the CodeIgniter framework will be able to jump right in and get in on writing EE add-ons and compete with those companies.

So, what do we get from the competition? Well, the first thing to happen is a shift in quality. New developers will attempt to 'out-class' the competition with more features, better designs, and generally higher quality products. Once quality reaches a saturation point, it becomes inefficient to compete on quality alone. Then we see a shift in price.

Maarten Balliauw has posted about some new tools that Eclipse developers out there can use to develop applications on the Windows Azure platform - the Windows Azure Tools for Eclipse.

While working on the Windows Azure SDK for PHP, I had the opportunity to test-drive the development builds of the Windows Azure Tools for Eclipse. Today, the project has been released officially at www.windowsazure4e.org. Windows Azure Tools for Eclipse provides a series of wizards and utilities that allow developers to write, debug, and configure for and deploy PHP applications to Windows Azure.

The plugin also includes the SDK to give PHP applications a simple API to interface with Windows Azure. Maarten also points to some beginner tutorials to help you get started.

Recently on his blog Sameer has posted a "first look" at the recently released nWire extension for Eclipse-based IDEs.

Due to various complex PHP applications being developed - like Magento, Joomla and a wide variety of frameworks, developers finds it hard to understand the underlying architecture and relationships between various components within the application. nWire lets you bring order to that complexity.

He looks at the features the tool offers - the visualizer, navigator and searching abilities - and details each of them with a few screenshots showing these features in action.

The Zend Developer Zone has a new post promoting an extension for the Zend Studio/Eclipse IDEs called nWire that allows you to get a better overall view of the structure of your PHP applications.

nWire was designed for developers who get lost in large and complex applications. It dramatically shortens the time it takes to read and understand the code and reduces the learning curve for new developers. [...] nWire was developed with support from Zend Technologies and works with the new Zend Studio 7.0 and Eclipse 3.5 (Galileo) with PHP Development Tools (PDT).

The tool includes a visualizer to graphically browse the parts of your application, a navigator to see associations in the code and a quick search that makes it simpler to search the entire project. You can find out more about the project including downloads and a 4 minute intro video on the nWire website.