Jan Bodnar has pointed out a great PHP-GTK tutorial on ZetaCode.com that walks you through some of the major points of this graphical frontend for PHP:

This tutorial will teach you the basics of GUI programming with the PHP GTK. The tutorial has 8 chapters which cover the first steps with the library, menus, toolbars, dialogs and various widgets. It has some examples for drawing with Cairo library. The final chapter presents a small computer game; The Nibbles.

Each of the topics has sample code and screenshots of the resulting output for each. Also included is information on layouts and "painting" with Cairo - drawing shapes, rectangles, text, etc.

The SitePoint PHP blog has part three of their "create your own Twitter widget" series posted today. This is the last post of the series and involves a little cleanup on the data pulled from the Twitter API.

In part 1 of this series, we examined the Twitter API, created a PHP TwitterStatus class, and imported the latest tweets in JSON format. In Part 2, we parsed the Twitter data, replaced links, and generated the complete HTML for our widget. In this last post, we'll cache our widget and translate tweet dates into a friendlier format - download the full source code here.

They talk about caching the data pulled back from the API (making it faster and less resource-intensive) and how to parse the dates that you get back from the request using the DateTime functionality included with PHP.

On the SitePoint PHP blog today Craig Buckler is back with the second part of their series on creating a Twitter widget for your site. You can find more about the first part of the series here.

In Part 1 of this series, we examined the Twitter API, creating a PHP TwitterStatus class, and imported the latest tweets in JSON format. Today, we'll populate the data into HTML templates - download the full source code here.

The templates are strings of HTML with tags for where the content belongs - in this case things like "{TWEETS}" and "{profile_image_url}". Regular expressions are used to parse the templates and a str_replace used to make the substitution. The final product is included showing a few example tweets with some parsed links inside each.

From the SitePoint PHP blog today there's a new tutorial from Craig Buckler (part one of a series) on how to create your own Twitter widget you can drop in anywhere on your site (main content or sidebar). It uses cURL to make the requests to the Twitter servers, so you'll need that installed on your PHP instance.

Because you can! Your own widget will always be more customizable than any off-the-shelf solution, and you'll be the envy of your peers. We've also been asked by several readers for articles about the topic, and it's a great introduction to PHP, REST APIs, JSON, regular expressions and Object Orientated Programming.

In this first part of the series, he helps you set up the class to connect to the Twitter services and fetch the latest statuses for the SitePoint account (obviously, you can substitute yours in its place) and some of the basics like templating and caching. The script uses the REST API since it only needs to fetch, so there's no messing around with the OpenID authentication the Twitter API now requires. You can also download the source for the code that'll be generated during the series.

Matthew Weier O'Phinney has a new post to his blog today showing you how to use action helpers to make widgets that you can reuse all over your Zend Framework application. His method doesn't use the "action()" helper, either.

The situation all started when Andries tweeted asking about what he considered some mis-behavior on the part of the action() view helper -- a situation that turned out not to be an issue, per se, but more a case of bad architecture within Zend Framework. [...] The helper was done this way because Zend Framework does not render views a single time -- it instead renders after each action, and accumulates views to render in the layout.

Instead, he offers action helpers as a solution. He gives an example of a user module that has views, helpers and forms but no controllers, including a Bootstrap file. This bootstrap defines the helpers, configuration file and adds the helpers into the process flow of the application. Once things are all set up and the action helper is created, adding the module to a page is as easy as calling "createProfileWidget()" into a partial view.

On NETTUTS.com a tutorial has been posted recently showing you how to build a widget for Buzz, the Google's service similar to Twitter. If you've ever worked with the Twitter timeline concept, using Buzz will feel very familiar. Unfortunately, for the moment at least, it's a read-only kind of thing.

At the moment, there's no API to work with the Buzz service; Google is expected to provide one within the next several months, however, for now, the public updates are available as Atom feeds.

They grab these Atom feeds via a proxy PHP script (can't cross-domain with Ajax, after all) and then some Ajax to real the latest from this proxy. The results are displayed in a (very familiar looking) timeline with the help of the included HTML and CSS/images. The last part of the process is to push it into a jQuery plugin for easier use down the line. You can get the source download here and check out a demo online.

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.

On the Debuggable blog Tim Koschutzki shows a way to have more than one paginated item on your page at a time (in a CakePHP application).

Many of you might have run into the problem of having multiple boxes on the same page that need to be paginated. For example you might have a left column with a list of members of your site and a right column that shows for a example a list of forums. Yeah, that's not the best example, but you get the idea.

The typical CakePHP pagination functional assumes that there's only one block of information that needs to be paginated per page. With Tim's modification, the model name for where the data is being pulled from is appended to the end of the URL and parsed by the script to know which is which.

A new tutorial on the Zend Developer Zone shows you how to use PHP's "younger cousin" PHP-GTK to make a simple widget.

With PHP's younger cousin PHP-GTK's recent step to maturity with the 2.0 stable release it is a good time to give this project some more attention. In this article I will show you how to create a re-usable IPv4 Entry widget using PHP-GTK's excellent OO structure.

The end result is an interface that lets the user input an IP in a familiar way (blocks of three, automatically advancing to the next block). They talk about the code first, describing how all of the parts fit together before giving you an easily cut-and-pastable block of code (the class) that creates the widget.

Just for you Lively early adopters out there, there's a script that's been posted to the International Stock Exchange forum showing how to get a feed into the virtual world.

Here is a free PHP script to convert the titles of a news feed to a PNG graphic for display in Google Lively. To display a news feed in Google Lively, go to the "Add object" button, search for "Picture Frame". Click on add to room and then edit properties. In Gadget Options place the url of the PHP script in the option box.

The script can then be hosted on a web server where it can pull down the latest stories and update the PNG image accordingly.