Phidgets is a PHP based desktop widget system. It is a quite simple framework, which lets you create really neat looking widgets for your desktop in no time. And the best of all these widgets are written entirely in PHP.
There is a set of some useful and graphically appealing widgets just packaged with the current release. Lets take a look at what you can do with the base package.
The starterbar is an application runner widget, which animates the icons representing your programs using a nice looking on mouse over zoom effect. It is most likely that you have seen this kind of bar in other widget systems too.
This widget was inspired by the easter egg in gnome which makes a litle fish swim across your desktop. Because this a PHP based desktop widget what would better represent it than a walking php elephant.
Because this application makes heavy usage of gtk to display the widgets and handle their events properly you need the php gtk extension installed for any of the widgets to work. Although the current release version should be working fine with phidgets you may want to take a look at the cvs repository and build you own. There is quite a lot of development going on in this project at the moment and therefore the prepackaged version seem to be quite of date some time.
Phidgets is quite well documented just take a look in the docs folder. There you will find documents on how to use phidgets as well as documents describing how to write your own cool widget.