Jack Herrington has posted a new tutorial to the Zend Developer Zone today showing how to combine PHP, your database of choice and Flex to create a dashboard in your application.

Let's face it: Interactive graphs and dashboards have never been easy to put together on the web. Sure, there are graphing libraries out there for PHP, but to get something that looks really good and that a user can play with has been tough. Or at least, it was yesterday.

He shows how to create a simple Flex application that takes in XML data (from whatever backend, he uses a PHP script that uses DOM) and displays the information - his sample traffic data - as a graph. This graph is an extension of the Elixir library from ILOG and makes dropping information into graphs and charts simple.

Screenshots of the Flex side of things and code for the PHP side are both provided.

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.

Ben Ramsey has put together a dashboard widget to grab the latest from the Funcaday.com website (spotlights one PHP function each day).

While reading through news and blog entries, I came across a post on Zend's Developer Zone about Paul Reinheimer's new PHP Function a Day website. The Function a Day site functions in much the same way as those nifty tear-off-a-page-per-day desktop calendars we all buy for those on our Christmas shopping lists for whom we can't quite figure out what to get.

TO help out the lazy out there, he's created this widget to grab the latest image from the funcaday website and pull it right into your Dashboard.

Stefan Mischook has taken a little time out from his beginner's guides to PHP to post today about the simplest way to set up PHP and MySQL on a Mac - MAMP.

In my beginners php videos, I recommended XAMPP as the way to easily install Apache, PHP, MySQL on a MAC. [...] This nifty little application allows you to (really easily) install Apache, PHP and MySQL. You are provided with a standard DMG file that you simply drag to your applications folder.

He includes screenshots, details on what the package contains, sample code using it and, of course, the Dashboard widget to start and stop the Apache and MySQL servers.

Picking back up on his blog, Sean Coates shares a Dashboard widget he's created to do quick and dirty PHP interpreting on the fly:

I found myself using php -r on the command line to test some simple code snippets, and it occurred to me that this isn't "The Mac Way." So, following the excellent documentation at Apple, I managed to come up with something pretty useful in an afternoon.

His widget sits happily, ready to take in PHP code and output the result at the click of a button.