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!

Over on the Mayflower blog, the group has set up their own series of "advent calendar" posts on a wide range of topics. Here's their list (updated as new items are posted):

• Cloud Transformation Model
• PHP 5.3 Features in Real Life (German)
• Setting up a QA environment for Javascript
• Generating PDFs in PHP (German)
• Doctrine 2
• Doctrine 2 - Zend Framework Integration
• One-click Deployment
• Good Reasons Why to Learn a CSS Meta Language like SASS or LESS
• Lösungen für Debugging von Mobile Web Apps (German)
• Migrate to HTML5!
• Javascript Metriken (German)
• Profiling mit XHProf (German)
• Backbone vs Knockout vs JavascriptMVC
• Using Custom Annotations in PHP
• Zend Framework (1) vs. Symfony2
• Eine Einfüehrung in Behavior Driven Development (German)
• Cloud2Go Services for Your Web Development
• Test Driven Javascript Development
• JsHint - Dan Bessere JsLint? (German)
• Agile Developer Skills (ADS)
• Zend Framwork und Backbone.js (German)
• Verpacktes in PHP (German)
• PHP and the Lean Startup

They're a mix of English and German articles, but with a handy translator you can follow along pretty well.

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!

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.

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!