In case you missed it, several members of the PHP community have banded together for this year's PHP Advent "calendar" articles. With today being the 25th, all of the posts have been made and there's tons of great content you don't want to miss out on like:

• GeoIP Wrangling
• PHP's Not Just a Language
• CSS and Other People
• Developers Versus Designers
• One Step at a Time
• Comprehensible Code

Check out the full list for this year for more excellent content.

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.

On the Ibuildings blog Cal Evans has written up a post urging everyone (not just developers and not just those in the PHP community, really) to be careful about what you spread around as good content and quality tutorials to the masses.

The web has made it easy for anyone to become an instant pundit, regardless of their background. The tools exist so that anyone can quickly and easily publish anything and call it a fact. [...] We as a community must do two things to help not only ourselves but also to improve the quality of the on-line help available.

He suggests two things we, as a community, can do to help with this problem - point out the technical articles that are, to put it nicely, just plain wrong and be sure to only pass along quality advice. The helpful hints and tutorials are only as good as the ones that are shared. Be sure they're one of "The Good Ones" to keep the quality of the community alive.

Right along with some of the other posts about the "best practices" that Google recently post, the PHP group has also responded to dispel some of the recommendations Google gives.

With regards to the new article posted at http://code.google.com/ speed/articles/optimizing-php.html, all of the advice in it is completely incorrect. We at the PHP team would like to offer some thoughts aimed at debunking these claims, which the author has clearly not verified.

The group through each of the five things Google recommends and tells why they are incorrect including the fact that, while some of the recommendations might have been true back in PHP3, they aren't at all true of the current PHP5 releases.

In a new article on PHPFreaks.com Brad Jacobs takes a look at creating a simple search of the information in your database. Their example will search a table containing article information (title, story content, etc).

The aim of this tutorial is to provide users with a basic layout and the logic behind creating a multiple field search in MySQL. As often time users tend to over do the search and add a lot of unnecessary code. By following and understanding this tutorial you should be able to implement this search into your own site and provide a nice and simple SQL Search of your own database. So roll up your sleeves and be prepared to get dirty.

Everything's provided for you - the SQL to build and fill the tables and the code to perform the search. They opted to go with LIKE statements in the where clause instead of using something like full-text searching. The former works for a lot of situations, but can get slower and slower the more rows there are in the table.

The SitePoint Web Tech blog is holding a contest to win copies of Adobe's Flex Builder software. All you have to do to enter is take a quiz!

Our latest Adobe-sponsored giveaway is live, and up for grabs this time are copies of Flex Builder 3. Just read our brand new article, Pimp Your PHP App With Flex - then take the quiz to enter the draw! You've got 7 days to take the quiz. Enter your details and you'll be in the running to win one of three copies of Adobe Flex Builder 3.

The tutorial looks at creating a first application with a Flex front end and a PHP backend - a script that accesses an API that returns either an XML or JSON formatted message.

Smashing Magazine has posted a new article from Chris Shiflett and Sean Coates with their rebuttal to the site's previous 10 Advanced Tips article.

In November 2008 we published the article 10 Advanced PHP Tips To Improve Your Programming. Apparently, according to negative comments to the post, it contained some errors and some statements that are just wrong. [...] To solve the problem, we asked Chris Shiflett and Sean Coates, two PHP gurus, to take a closer look at the article, explain its errors and make it perfectly clear what is actually right and wrong in the theory and practice. This article is a professional response to our article published a couple of months ago.

Here's the more accurate descriptions of those tips - what's good and what's bad - as presented by Chris and Sean:

• Use an SQL Injection Cheat Sheet
• Know the Difference Between Comparison Operators
• Shortcut the else
• Drop Those Brackets
• Favor str_replace() Over ereg_replace() and preg_replace()
• Use Ternary Operators
• Memcached
• Use a Framework
• Use the Suppression Operator Correctly
• Use isset() Instead of strlen()

On his PseudoCoder.com blog Matt has posted the fifth edition of the CakePHP Digest - summing up recently CakePHP-related news into one neat package.

This is my third digest and for the first time there isn't a clear lead story. I was going to go with gwoo's message that CakePHP 1.2 had received close to 25k downloads in the first 6 days of its release. That works out to 1.5 million downloads extrapolated over a full year. Actual download rate will likely taper off - I just wanted to use the word extrapolate.

Other topics mentioned include:

• Daniel Hofstetter's framework free agency
• Discussions about whether to accept bugs without test cases
• An article on building The Bakery
• Comparisons to Symfony and the Yii frameworks
• Lots of new content in The Bakery

According to this quick note on the PHP Women site, the group has been featured in the latest issue (Dec 2008) of php|architect magazine.

PHPWomen are featured in the December issue of the php|architect magazine, we're the subject of this month's /etc column! If you aren't already a subscriber - then go and check out the options, they even have a free issue offer so there are no excuses.

The column, written by PHP Women's own Lorna Mitchell, looks at some of the goals of the group, the work they do sponsoring female developers where they can, their mentoring programs and the communication methods - IRC and forums - that are open to all, not just female developers.

You can check out the issue here (and order a copy too!)

Richard Thomas has put together a quick listing of resources, tips and articles for the Solar PHP framework.

Here is a quick reference list to a ton of Solar Framework Articles around the web.

He's broken it up into Tutorials (including a few from our own blog), Tips and other random content.