One of the things that I'm most asked for in my portal/cms work that I've done is a calendaring system. People always want a more visual way to see when entries have been made - just to get a better overall picture of how things work. Well, in the latest Zend Tricks of the Trade, the author shows you how to create just that - a calendar interface with PHP, MySQL, XHTML, and a side order of CSS.

The article steps you through getting your CSS and PHP all set up and ready to go, complete with all the code and an example of how to use in to fetch the results from your blog/news posting/message boards/etc. There's so many different uses for this kind of thing, that it's nice that they didn't hard-code it to show only one kind of example. All you'd have to do is grab the dates out of whatever table you want to show in the calendar (that's the only limitation, they need to come out as a day of the month), and then call the build_calendar function with that data, and you're all set!