WordPress is a highly extensible CMS, however utilizing some of its features can sometimes be a real chore and untidy code. Taking a cue from the sidebar widgets API, I developed an API to more easily create dashboard widgets. After installing the plugin, just write a class with a ‘widget’ method and optionally a ‘form’ method (to handle widget configuration), then call the register function on your classname.

Here is a link to the WP plugin link:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/dashboard-widget-api/

And here is the actual hosting of the repo on GitHub
https://github.com/markparolisi/wp-dashboard-widget-api

* I know that I still need to fix the documentation on this. Expect an update very soon. *