From the CatsWhoCode.com blog there's a new list of ten things you can do to help improve the performance and add extra functionality to your WordPress installation's dashboard.

The dashboard is a very important part of a WordPress blog. In fact, it allows you to control your posts, your blog design, and many more things. When building a site for a client, it is especially important to be able to control WP's dashboard. In this article, let's have a look at 10 extremely useful hacks for WordPress' dashboard.

Some of their hacks include:

• Remove dashboard menus
• Replace dashboard logo with yours
• Disable the "please upgrade now" message
• Add custom widgets to WordPress dashboard
• Provide help messages

In this new post to his blog Matt Curry shows off a CakePHP status dashboard that can be included in your CakePHP app to get some vital statistics on its current state.

You build a cool CakePHP app and now you have to maintain it. You go to Google to check your analytics; you SSH to your system to check log files; You log into your web admin to check affiliate clicks'¦ Wouldn't it be cool if you could check all this (and more) from one page? That's what this status plugin does.

You can see a screenshot here and grab the code from the project's github page. Right now you can use the Google Analytics, shell logging, system information and log file viewer panels.

Stefan Koopmanschap has taken his own look at the latest offering from Zend - the Zend Server.

Zend released a new web application server product earlier this week called Zend Server. Curious as I am, I'm going to have a quick look into it here. I decided to start fresh so I launched my Parallels and installed a fresh Debian VM to check Zend Server out on. After running through the Debian installation I was ready to start the work.

He mentions a few of the "goods" - like the Debian package that's already built (just an apt-get call away), the nice interface and some of the bads - the "not quite enterprise" feel of the dashboard (looks a lot like Zend Platform) and a few smaller setup issues that could be easily fixed in future releases.

His overall impression is a bit indifferent, though he notes that

This is just a beta though, so things may change in the future. We'll see. [...] It's good to see something new coming from Zend, but I think they could've done better.

The NETTUTS.com site has pointed out five new features of the latest WordPress release (2.7) that come bundled in by default.

Wordpress 2.7 is to be publically released in the next week, and a whole bunch of features have been packed in, looking past the obvious such as the new redesign. The new dashboard, Screen options, Plugins, Themes and Core upgrades and the media library!

Here's the list of five:

• New Commenting system
• New Dashboard Features
• Screen Options
• Plugin Interface
• Media Library
• Posts Management

They detail each with subheadings and screenshots of the new improvements in action.

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.