From the folks that have brought you the PHP Advent series of posts in the past (Chris Shiflett, Sean Coates and all of their great contributing authors) comes this year's more general selection of articles - webadvent.org.

Christmas is upon us once again, and it's time to have a look at what's under the Web Advent tree. Join us each day as our wonderful authors provide presents of tips, tricks, & tidbits to usher in the new year.

This years posts are (list will be updated as more are added)

• Debugging Zen (Ben Ransey)
• Going from One to a Million Users (Joel Perras)
• The Gift of Sharing What You Know (Heather Payne)
• Better Forms for Mobile Users (James Socol)
• SSH Tips (Lorna Mitchell)
• PhantomJS (Paul Reinheimer)
• The Anti-Spec Movement is Going Too Far (Tracy Obsorn)
• Make a Difference (Noah Stokes)
• Dealing with Image Blocking (Chesley Andrews)
• More Code, More Problems (Ed Finkler)
• Landing on Your Feet (Emily Davis)
• Light It Up with Markup (Patrick Haney)
• Continuous Deployment Practices (Laura Thompson)
• Persisten Terminal Sessions (Remy Sharp)
• More than a Dot (James Duncan)
• Security in the Round (Chris Cornutt)
• Retina Ready (Jakie Balzer)
• Node.js with Express.js is in Business (Andreas Birkebaek)
• Three Ugly Sisters (Pádraic Brady)
• Take Time to Make Time (Jeff Loiselle)
• CSS Sliding Panels (Bedrich Rios)
• Get a Little Uncomfortable (Laura Beth Denker)
• The Long View (Lachlan Hardy)
• Be Lazy (Kit Hodsden)

You can find articles from previous years in the site's sidebar.

This year's PHP Advent calendar has finished up and if you haven't gotten a chance to check out some of the great content in this year's edition, be sure to take a look at the full list. It incudes topics like:

• Front-end testing with SimpleTest
• Scalable applications
• Cross-origin ajax
• working with Chef
• Error handling
• Dates and Times

The articles are by several well-knowns both in the PHP community and outside. While you're there, be sure to check out some of the previous years too!

It's that time of year again and this year's PHP Advent has kicked off with the first article posted yesterday. Below is a list of the articles for this year's advent calendar, to be updated as each new one is released:

• Because It's Fun! by Derek Sivers
• More Than Just Style by Laura Beth Denker
• Reduced-Friction Deployment by Chris Hartjes
• Better Than the Rest by Rob Allen
• A Stitch in Time Saves Nine by Paul Jones
• Dates and Times by Evert Pot
• Twilio in Two Minutes by Elizabeth Naramore
• Integration Testing by Wez Furlong
• Merry Error Handling by Samer Atiani
• Better Object-Oriented Arrays by Ryan Parman
• Out with the Old by Maggie Nelson
• Bake Cookies Like a Chef by Michael Nitschinger
• Don't Forget the Front by Beth Tucker Long
• Nightmare Before (Last) Christmas by Jeremy Kendall
• Cross-Origin Ajax with CORS by David Walsh
• Cracks in the Foundation by Gwynne Raskind
• PHP for All the Things by Matt Graham
• Simplifying Commerce for Small Business by Ben Ramsey
• Egomaniacal and Scalable Apps by David Coallier
• Code for the Users, Not for the Spec by Drew McLellan
• Social-Driven Development by Chris Cornutt
• Keep the Front in the Front by Rachel Andrew
• Look Ma! No Passwords! by Dan Mills
• Facilitating Development Environment Consistency by Jeff Loiselle

Check back for the growing list as this year's advent gets more great content every day!

Derek Allard has a quick post for the CodeIgniter users out there with some styling you can use on the default CI calendar.

A project I'm working on needs a monthly calendar. Naturally, I'm using CodeIgniter as the base of it. [...] My needs were something more akin to the interface iCal provides; broad, spacious, subtle. Obviously, the default is just an unstyled base that CI provides as a starting grounds. The Calendar library documentation provides some insight into how we can start changing this up.

He talks about the settings he needed to change including the "day_type" setting and template that specifies the CSS classes to use. Add in the CSS and you'll end up with something like this. You can download the example files too.

On the Yahoo Developer Network a new post talks about some of the developer "advent" calendars that have popped up around the web - including the PHP Advent.

Christmas is upon us. Developers are embracing the spirit of sharing their knowledge and wisdom, while taking the opportunity to look back and recollect what 2010 brought us in terms of new technologies and ideas. A number of "advent" calendars started posting their blog-a-day-till-Dec-24th. Here are some for your reading pleasure while you kick back with a glass of wine by the fireplace.

Also on the list are: the 24 Ways (general web dev), the Perl Advent, Web Performance Calendar and the HTML5 Advent. Be sure to check out the comments for more calendars!

Good news for all of the fans of the PHP Advent article series that comes around this time each year - Chris Shiflett has confirmed it'll be happening again this year.

PHP Advent is our little way of showcasing some of the talented people who work with PHP in some form or fashion, and persuading them to share something they've learned during a busy month when they might otherwise keep quiet. We'll be publishing an article each day in December until Christmas.

If you're new to the PHP Advent (or advent-type article calendar things), check out last year's articles from lots of great members of the PHP community covering everything from development processes, technology tips and parenting.

On the Zend Developer Zone, there's a post from Keith Casey about an open source project he's worked on for the past three years has made it to get where it is. This also includes some of the challenges they faced and how they've made sure the code's gotten better over time.

When most people think of Open Source PHP projects, some immediately spring to mind. If you're a developer or a blogger, there are obvious choices, but what about options for small to medium businesses? What Open Source projects are out there to help with day to day operations and track how projects are going?

The project, web2project, started as a fork of another project but has taken on a life of its own. They looked at what the users wanted and added iCal feeds and the idea of "hooks" developers could use to attach their own components into the project's structure. They also added loads of unit tests to ensure that things were kept stable as well as some more advanced time handling via the DateTime object PHP has to offer. If you'd like to see the current state of the project, you can find it over on SourceForge.

In a previous article posted to the Okada Design Blog, they showed you how to create a calendar using jQuery, CodeIgniter and the BackendPro toolset. They're back with a new article today showing how you can do the same thing without BackendPro.

I have some requests for a Event Calendar without BackendPro. Since it is not using BeP, I only used CRUD without individual calendar. So there won't be any mycal function. I took out all of the Bep thingy and made it simpler (I hope).

If you want the full tutorial on how the CodeIgniter part is set up, check out their previous article. If you're just looking for the new sans-BackendPro code, you can download it here.

On the Okada Design Blog there's a recent tutorial posted showing you how to create a simple calendar system by combining the CodeIgniter PHP framework and jQuery for some of the client side features.

This blog inspired me to make an event calendar using CodeIgniter. You can download Bari's source files. Please unzip it and save them. We are going to use them later. Bari puts a demo here. We are going to add this to CodeIgniter. I continue using BackendPro for this purpose.

Using the BakcendPro as a base, they create everything else to wrap around it: some CSS and Javascript, a database table to store the events, and the PHP code - the controller, model and views for general viewing, editing and creating a new calendar. Full code is provided for all both in cut&pasteable code blocks and in a downloadable file.

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.