On the "24 Days in December" advent calendar there's an article posted from Kalle Sommer Nielsen that talks about some ways that you can give back to PHP including documentation updates, contributing to the core code and just helping out the community in general.

PHP has a tremendous community behind it, that community consists of you and me, and millions of others that help promote PHP by continuing to develop awesome applications that power some of the biggest websites in the world, but within this community exists a relatively small community that actively develops PHP, such as making it run on your favorite platform or making your favorite extensions compile and work or even keeps the documentation up-to-date. Today I want to dwell into that community, and perhaps giving you flavor enough to contribute back to PHP with code.

The article suggests several places you can give back including:

• updating and adding changes to the PHP manual documentation
• participating in the various project mailing lists
• reviewing pull requests on the project's GitHub repository
• writing tests for the untested parts of the language

Kalle wraps up the article talking about his own experience with the language over the years and how it ended up that he was the one to remove register_globals from the language one day.

In the latest post to his site Larry Garfield makes a charge to the community - both Drupal and the wider PHP community - to gave back in 2016 and make an effort to contribute in some way back to the projects you use and love.

At the end of 2014, I wrote a follow-up for Acquia's Future of PHP series. In that, I called on people to Build Bridges between communities through not just visiting them, but building with them. Build and launch a real project with some toolkit that's not your usual go-to tool, and then documenting and sharing that knowledge with others.

While recording another episode of the Acquia Podcast with JAM (who seems to like having me on for some reason), he asked me what was next. What was the next 2016 challenge to help build a more robust PHP community?

This one should be easy, right? Give back.

He suggests not only that you get out and give back but that you also do it in somewhat unfamiliar territory. He points out that with most of the software we use we're "standing on the shoulders of giants" and without these people giving their time to help the project, it wouldn't be where it is. He includes a few suggestions of things to think about when looking for a place to contribute:

• look for projects "affiliated" with the ones you usually contribute to
• if you've never contributed before, there's an even wider range of options (frameworks, extensions, libraries, etc)
• report bugs if you don't feel like you can contribute code

He does include a reminder that not all projects and communities will be a good fit for you and how you'd like to contribute, so find a good fit and then dig in.

Three contributions, to three projects, in any way, that is new to you. That's the ask. That's #PHPGivesBack2016. And then talk about it. Giving back is something to be proud of so be proud of it, and encourage others to do so as well.