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!

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.

Derick Rethans has continued his series on garbage collection in the PHP internals with this second post of the series with a special look at circular references. You can find the first part here.

In this second part of the three part column on the new garbage collecting mechanism in PHP 5.3, we'll dive into a solution to the problem with circular references. If we look quickly back, we found that by using code like the [first example], an in-request memory leak is created.

He goes on to briefly describe the synchronous algorithm (including a few more helpful graphs to show the flow) and how that has worked its way into the PHP garbage collection methods. He also points out that this collection can be turned off and on via the gc_enable and gc_disable functions. Keep an eye out for the next part of the series where he gets into more detail on how this is all integrated into PHP.

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.