Its the holiday season and even the PHP community is getting into the spirit. Much like last year, >Chris Shiflett (joined this time by >Sean Coates) have created this year's PHP Advent calendar.

From Chris Shiflett's blog:

Is it December again already? I like good traditions, so with the help of Sean and many others, PHP Advent is back again, this time with its own domain. I would call it a web site, but that might be stretching the truth at the moment. Jon is going to help us out with a simple design in the very near future. The focus, of course, is the quality content from our gracious authors.

The December 1st post for this year is one by yours truely - You Need the PHP Community. For more great content as the month goes on, you can keep up either through their feed, on Twitter or just by heading over to the site each day.

Now that it's all wrapped up, Chris Shiflett has posted his own look back at the PHP Advent calendar he coordinated.

Coordinating this turned out to be a lot of work, but I hope to do it again next year. [...] With a little bit of prodding, we all hopefully learned a little more than we would have otherwise, and the people who were gracious enough to share something deserve our thanks.

You can check out his post (and, of course, our own) for a complete list of all twenty-four days.

Chris Shiflett has started up a PHP project for the holidays - a PHP Advent Calendar to share helpful hints and knowledge from members of the PHP community:

Welcome to the PHP Advent Calendar. If you are unfamiliar with the format of an Advent calendar, Wikipedia has a pretty good description. The PHP Advent Calendar is similar in spirit to the Perl Advent Calendar, a tradition the Perl community has sustained for several years.

So far he's posted the first (Sean Coates) and second (Elizabeth Naramore) days. Keep an eye on his blog for more holiday PHP goodness!

You can also keep track of the latest ones on this calendar Sean has put together as well as on our list below:

Days:

• Day 1: Sean Coates (using mail)
• Day 2: Elizabeth Naramore (documentation)
• Day 3: Sebastian Bergmann (finding bugs)
• Day 4: James McGlinn (Handling SSL/Non-SSL Redirection)
• Day 5: Cal Evans (lesser known resources)
• Day 6: Davey Shafik (UIs and APIs)
• Day 7: Elizabeth Smith (SPL to the Rescue)
• Day 8: Matthew Weier O'Phinney (Don't Reinvent the Wheel)
• Day 9: Ivo Jansch (Design Patterns)
• Day 10: Chris Cornutt (Planning)
• Day 11: Ben Ramsey (Getting Involved in the PHP Community)
• Day 12: Ed Finkler (Making Assumptions & Asking Questions)
• Day 13: Terry Chay (web site security)
• Day 14: David Sklar (timing and profiling)
• Day 15: Paul Reinheimer (channels and output)
• Day 16: Jeff Moore ("What We Can Learn about Software Development from a Failing Restaurant")
• Day 17: Ilia Alshanetsky (grepping for parse errors)
• Day 18: Christian Wenz (WSDL despite PHP5)
• Day 19: Marcus Borger (using the Google charting API)
• Day 20: Adam Trachtenberg (SQLite)
• Day 21: Luke Welling (Follow the Big Dogs?)
• Day 22: Derick Rethans (Using the VLD tool)
• Day 23: Jay Pipes (Two PHP/MySQL Tips)
• Day 24: Nate Abele (Session Security)