The Laravel News site has linked to a presentation from Mikhail Vink at the recent Dutch PHP Conference in Amsterdam. The video they've linked to was a presentation he gave showing 42 Tips & Tricks for PHPStorm, a popular PHP IDE.

With the PhpStorm IDE buzzing in modern PHP community, there are always many neat things to learn for better synergy with your every-day tool for web development. This session will give you an insight on 42 powerful tips and tricks that will make you more productive and efficient. From lightning-smart navigation to debugging and testing hidden tricks, from making UI of the IDE even more suitable for presentations to some handy tools integrations - all of those tips will find a good use in your development workflow.

You can watch the video of the full presentation over on YouTube. The video is a full-on screencast so you get to see every move he makes including special keystrokes, general IDE functionality, settings changes and built in tools like a REST client and integration with other external tools.

The SitePoint PHP blog has a new tutorial today from editor Bruno Skvorc with some tips and tricks to help you master Composer, the widely popular PHP package management tool.

Composer has revolutionized package management in PHP. It upped the reusability game and helped PHP developers all over the world generate framework agnostic, fully shareable code. But few people ever go beyond the basics, so this post will cover some useful tips and tricks.

Tips in his list include:

• Installing Composer globally
• Using "composer require" to install packages
• Committing your composer.lock file
• Options to provide profiling information
• Speeding up Composer installations

...and many more. If you're looking to take your Composer usage and knowledge beyond the basics, definitely check out this article.

On DZone.com there's a new post from Chris Chang that's the third part of the series looking at using various language drivers for working with MongoDB. In this latest article he focuses in on the PHP driver, giving a brief introduction and a few handy tips.

This blog post is the third of a series where we are covering each of the major MongoDB drivers in depth. The driver we’ll be covering here is the PHP driver, developed and maintained by the MongoDB, Inc. team (primarily @derickr, @bjori and @jmikola).

He includes a link to some basic examples and shares a "production-ready connect string" with some MongoLab recommended settings. The tips include topics ranging from working with index builds, the lowering of is_master_interval and configuring the connectionTimeoutMS setting for optimum connection handling.

The Software Testing Magazine site has posted some helpful tips for using PHPUnit in a new post. This is part of a series - the first post introducing PHPUnit and the second showing how to use mocks and stubs.

I have showed how to set up PHPUnit and how to get started with unit tests and how to handle mocking and stubbing objects in order to effectively isolate your code under test. This article will explore a few ways to get the most out of your PHPUnit tests.

They cover a few different topics including:

• Working with static methods
• Working with frameworks
• Working with databases
• Effective testing for current and new projects

Sven Eisenschmidt has put together a site that want to help beginners with the Symfony2 framework get up to speed quickly with some handy tips and tricks they can use in their development.

Some of the tips listed so far include:

• How to free Symfony2 from the sandbox tutorial (with some help from Git)
• Doctrine in the Real World - Presentation from Symfony Live 2011
• The Path to Symfony in the USA- Presentation from Symfony Live 2011
• Form naming
• Translate form labels inside Twig templates

Check out the full blog for more tips and links to presentations.

On Reddit.com there's a recent post with a question about some of the lesser known PHP tricks that other developers might have picked up out there. The post has pulled in quite a few suggestions including:

• Using predefined interfaces
• The streams API
• Defining constant defaults
• The speed differences in reading parts of arrays
• Boolean attribution

There's also a full discussion on closures/lambdas that no "features" post on PHP would be complete without. Have some tips to share? Add yours to the post too!

Noupe.com has posted a few tips to help you get the most out of your WordPress installation - everything from basic tweaks to database optimization.

Performance is a key factor for any successful website. And since WordPress is becoming more popular than ever, it will only be at its best when raised in the proper conditions. Here are a few things to try if you find that your WordPress site is not performing as well as it could be due to high traffic or hidden issues you don’t know about.

Here's their list of tips and tricks:

• Upgrade to latest WordPress release
• Remove unnecessary Plugins & upgrade current ones
• Minimize PHP and database queries
• Optimize and Repair your Database from myPhpAdmin
• Use Reliable image hosting service
• Optimize your images with this great tool
• Install WP Super Cache Plugin
• PHP Speedy WP
• WP CSS
• DB Cache
• Speed up access to your favorite frameworks via the AJAX Libraries API
• Display page loading time + number of queries
• Optimize DB

Those wanting to get into Facebook development might want to check out this new site Hasin Hayder has been working on - a Facebook Cookbook (not affiliated with the O'Reilly book by the same name). He talks about it here.

So i am planning to star writing an open book (right now it is a blog, when we will have thousands or recipes we will make it a book) which will follow cookbook approach for Facebook application developers. I will highlight common problems (there are numbers of problems with no solutions in their wikis) and their solutions which I've learned in my last one and half year journey as an application developer on Facebook platform.

Several topics have already been covered including:

• facebook reveals status api - how to use it?
• how to resize facebook popup dialog box
• how to add profile tab for your facebook application
• how to successfully update all of your user’s profile offline, at once!
• publishing on your friend’s mini feed (no session key)

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

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