In this recent tutorial (a part of the Symfony project's advent series) Laurent Bonnet about getting the Symfony framework installed on a Windows 2008 server running the IIS web server.

In order to prepare for Internet deployment, the tutorial can be executed in a dedicated server environment, hosted on the Internet. Of course, it's possible to complete the tutorial on a local server, or a virtual machine at the reader's workstation.

Laurent briefly talks about some of the differences between the 64 bit and 32 bit versions of Windows, setting up the database connection (SQLite), configuring the Windows server and using the Web Platform Installer it get PHP up and running. The tutorial also covers the setup of a sandbox and production environment via the command-line symfony tool.

In the spirit of several others on the web this holiday season, Stoyan Stefanov has started up his own advent calendar. He's already posted several articles in the series including:

• The performance roadmap
• Required reading
• The pain points of having fewer components
• Data URIs, MHTML and IE7/Win7/Vista blues

You can keep an eye on this post for an update as each new article is added to the calendar.

Stefan Koopmanschap has posted about some major recent advancements with Symfony framework:

Great stuff is happening today! I would dare to say that to date, December 1 2009 is probably the most active and important day in the history of the symfony project! Three(!) new versions have been released, amongst which the first of the last branch of symfony 1, and a new book is available in the form of an online advent calendar and a print book.

The releases included a major bugfix release (1.2.10) and the two new branches - Symfony 1.3 and 1.4. You can find their advent calendar for this year here. Its different than in the last two years - it's not a project but more the usual collection of articles.

As Chris Shiflett mentions in a new post to his blog, this year's PHP Advent series of articles has kicked off with the first article, Comprehensible Code by Paul Jones (of the Solar framework project.

With the help of Sean and twenty-four fantastic authors from the PHP community, PHP Advent is back for a third year.

You can keep up with the latest articles either by checking back at phpadvent.org daily, following them on Twitter or by subsscribing to their feed.

The symfony blog has start up their own "advent calendar" of sorts (similar to what they've done in previous years) - creating an entire application in a single month, from December 1st through 31st. This time its the jobeet.org jobs website. Here's the list of each day:

• Do you know Jobeet?
• Jobeet - Day 1: Starting up the Project
• Jobeet - Day 2: The Project
• Jobeet - Day 3: The Data Model
• Jobeet - Day 4: The Controller and the View
• Jobeet - Day 5: The Routing
• Jobeet - Day 6: More with the Model
• Jobeet - Day 7: Playing with the Category Page
• Jobeet - Day 8: The Unit Tests
• Jobeet - Day 9: The Functional Tests
• Jobeet - Day 10: The Forms
  
  
• Jobeet - Day 11: Testing your Forms
• Jobeet - Day 12: The Admin Generator
• Jobeet - Day 13: The User
• Jobeet - Day 14: The Lazy Day
• Jobeet - Day 15: Feeds
• Jobeet - Day 16: Web Services
• Jobeet - Day 17: Search
• Jobeet - Day 18: AJAX
• Jobeet - Day 19: Internationalization and Localization
  
  
• Jobeet - Day 20: The Plugins
• Jobeet - Day 21: The Design Day
• Jobeet - Day 22: The Cache
• Jobeet - Day 23: The Deployment
• Jobeet - Day 24: Another Look at symfony

Stay tuned to the Symfony blog for more updates!

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)