The "24 Days in December" project is an effort to share "thoughts from the PHPamily", members of the PHP community from all levels of experience and "age" in the community. For the month of December they've posted several articles, each from a member of the community building up to Christmas. If you haven't been reading along, here's a selection of the posts so far:

• My Year in the PHP Community by Holger Woltersdorf
• Make a Difference by Adam Englander
• Kid Friendly PHP by Elena Kolevska
• My Journey into the PHP Community by Ekin Bayar
• The Power of the Language by * Ramon de la Fuente*

These are just a few of the great articles so far so be sure to check out the full list for perspectives and thoughts from other members of the community.

As is mentioned in this new post on Anna Filina's site, the Call for Papers for the ConFoo Vancouver event is now open. ConFoo Vancouver is an extension of the already popular ConFoo conference that has been happening in Montreal for several years now.

ConFoo Vancouver 2016 will take place at the Sheraton Wall Centre in Vancouver, Canada on December 5-7, 2016. We are looking for speakers willing to share their experience and their skills with developers and managers.

The Vancouver 2016 conference will [several] the following aspects of web development [including]: accessibility, databases, HTML & CSS, Javascript, mobile, PHP, Ruby, security.

The Call for Papers for the event will only be open until June 6th, so be sure to get those submissions in early (and often!) to be considered as a speaker for this year's event. Final speaker selections will be announced on June 27th.

The Symfony blog has a post officially announcing the release of the SymfonyCon Paris schedule for their 2015 event (happening December 1st through 5th).

And here it is! After a month of deliberations and thoughts, we finally selected all the speakers for SymfonyCon Paris 2015! It’s been very difficult to choose among all the great talk proposals we received, thank you again to all the people who took the time to submit a talk idea. The complete schedule of the conference is out! For Symfony’s 10th birthday, be ready to listen to super exciting talks.

Speakers at this year's event include:

• Nicolas Grekas (about Symfony 3)
• Ryan Weaver (Symfony as a microframework)
• Several members of the core team including Sarah Khalil, Benjamin Eberlei and Kris Wallsmith

You can find the full schedule on the SymfonyCon Paris website or just pick up your ticket now!

The Symfony blog has officially announced SymfonyCon Paris including its dates - December 3rd through 5th.

We’re so thrilled and excited to announce SymfonyCon Paris! We’ve just confirmed the official dates, SymfonyCon Paris 2015 will be December 3-5 in a famous Parisian theater: Les Folies Bergère!

To celebrate Symfony’s 10th birthday it was logical to come back to Symfony’s hometown. As you were (almost) all asking for it, there was nothing more to convince us to do it in Paris. But Paris, is a very big city, with a lot of venues and this year is so special… To celebrate Symfony’s birthday, we picked up a magical venue… Welcome to les Folies Bergère! It’s downtown Paris and very easy to access wherever you are in Paris.

You can pick up Early Bird tickets right now from the conference site. If you're of the speaking sort, you could also submit to the Call for Paper that's open until June 30th. There will be workshops happening before the conference and the 5th will be a "hackday" for those wanting to gather with fellow Symfony developers and work out some code.

The Symfony blog has a reminder for those in the Warsaw, Poland area - save the dates of December 10th through the 14th for this year's SymfonyCon Warsaw.

We’re very happy to announce the first SymfonyCon! It will take place in Warsaw, Poland, from December 10th to 14th. Get ready for this upcoming conference! But okay, the SymfonyCon is probably confusing you all, so it’s time for a little recap of all the conferences we’re organizing all over the world. Thus, starting from this year, the Symfony Live conferences will be now local events, which means that they will be organized for the Symfony Community of the host country. [...] nd here comes the SymfonyCon, which will be an international conference. [...] he first one we’re organizing will be held in Europe, and we’ve chosen Warsaw to organize it!

The conference will be at the Westin hotel with two workshop days and, two days of conference sessions followed by a day of hacking/certification exams. If you want to submit, the Call for Papers is now open until July 31st or you can pick up your early bird tickets for just 199 Euro.

Cal Evans has officially announced his latest in his series of full-day virtual conferences aimed at PHP developers - the PHP Master Series, Volume 1 (from the Day Camp 4 Developers):

There is a lot of good information shared at conferences and sadly not event 1% of developers who identify themselves as PHP developers, ever get to attend one. This makes me sad. So I’m trying something new. [...] I went through the PHP conferences from the second-half of this year and picked out 6 that really stood out. This was a very difficult task; the PHP community and conferences are blessed with a bounty of great talks and speakers. The criteria I used was topics, joind.in score, and speaker. I tried to find talks that were on topics that are of interest to developers, that others liked, and that were given by speakers I know, and know do a good job.

This one-day virtual event is happening December 21st (a Friday) and is made up of six different talks from six different speakers:

• Designing Beautiful Software - Matthew Weier O'Phinney
• Cryptography For The Average Developer - Anthony Ferrara
• Javascript Best Practices & BackboneJS for the PHP Developer - Ryan Weaver
• Your code sucks, let's fix it. - Rafael Dohms
• Building a Firehose - Ian Barber
• From POX to HATEOAS, A Real Company's Journey Building a RESTful API - Luke Stokes

You can pick up your ticket to attend for just $50 USD as a regular attendee (or voice only for those that just want to listen in). There's also an option for an "Office Party" for $100 USD if you have more than a few folks that would like to attend.

The Atlanta PHP User Group has announced their December 2012 meeting happening on the 6th. The presenter this time will be Jonathan Hill covering multi-tasking in PHP.

When it comes to multi-tasking and interacting with the operating system, PHP is no lightweight. In this talk we’ll explore PHP’s little-known POSIX, Process Control, and Semaphore extensions and show you how to introduce a parallel dimension to your applications.

A "mini-talk" will also be given by Jason Bouffard about screen scraping with Goutte. The meeting is on December 6th at 7pm at the Strongbox West offices in Atlanta.

Miro has submitted some information about the latest meeting of the Zagreb PHP User Group happening December 13th at 6pm in the Multimedia Institute:

Although Zagreb PHP Meetup started only 3 months ago with monthly meetups (up to 30 developers coming), our next meeting will be first meetup with organized talks. December meetup will have 5 talks with themes like 'How to write readable code?', 'Flex & PHP development' , 'Introduction to test driven development' && 'MySQL - explain explained'.

We would like to invite all interested PHP and non-PHP developers that would like to listen to some of best Croatian PHP devs (and understand Croatian language) to come on December 13th from 6PM to Mama, Preradoviceva 18 in Zagreb. Unfortunately we are limited with number of available seats so please signup at http://zgphp.eventbrite.com/.

Due to space limitations, there's only 12 seats available so hurry and reserve your spot if you'd like to attend (it's free)!

Have a user group meeting you'd like announced? Let us know!

On the Zend Developer Zone today there's a new announcement from Ralph Schindler about this month's Zend Framework Bug Hunt happening this Thursday, Friday and Saturday (the 16th through the 18th).

Has Zend Framework been good to you this year? Are you trying to figure out what to give to Zend Framework for Christmas? Well, search no more- Zend Framework wants one thing: for you to close some bugs at this month's bug-hunt! This Thursday, Friday and Saturday of December (the 16th, 17th and 18th 2010), we'll be hosting our monthly bug hunt. For those of you unfamiliar with the event, each month, we organize the community to help reduce the number of open issues reported against the framework.

Last month they had 111 issues closed and are hoping for at least that this month. Volunteers have come together to find and squash bugs that have popped up during the life of the Zend Framework. If you're interested in helping this month, take a look at Ralph's post for what you'll need to do before and during the event.

Chris Jones has announced the release of the latest version of the Undergroupnd PHP & Oracle Manual.

A hot-off-the-press, free, 290 page, updated version of the Underground PHP & Oracle Manual is available for download from http://www.oracle.com/technology/tech/php/pdf/underground-php-oracle-manual.pdf. [...] The previous edition was released way back in May 2007. Since then, Oracle Database 11g and the OCI8 1.3 extension have been released, there have been various changes in PHP community, and I've simply just gathered more notes, examples and have more information to share.

The manual has doubled in size and includes tons of new content reflecting the updates since the previous release. Chris thanks those who helped in creating the content, helped get it out to the community and his co-author Alison Holloway.