The 7PHP.com site, in collaboration with the Nomand PHP user group is giving away two free tickets to attend this month's user group event (happening May 22nd).

NomadPHP is like a virtual PHP User Group mainly for people who do not have the chance to avail of a local PHP user group. But it is open to ANYONE around the world. NomadPHP is an initiative brought forward by the icon of The PHP Community, namely 'His Awesomeness' Mr Cal Evans. It will kick-start its first group talk session on the Wednesday 22nd May 2013 (i.e in some 16 days as from the date of this post). The speaker is the PRO PHP Guy / PRO Zend Framework Evangelist and author of the book Zend Framework in action, Rob Allen. Rob will be introducing and talking about Zend Framework 2 - it is a must for anyone willing to learn ZF 2.

The Nomad PHP user group is designed to be a "user group for those that don't have one". It's a virtual group meeting once a month that you can attend anywhere in the world. You do have to purchase tickets, however. This post shows you how you can enter to win one of the two free tickets, though - either via email or by writing a PHP article for 7PHP.com.

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.

A while back there was an article that put a negative spin on PHP ("PHP: a fractal of bad design") and there was a huge community response to it with over 1400 comments on the post itself. Over on the DevShed forums, there's a lengthy new post that goes back over that article, piece by piece, and evaluates everything that was said.

As I've seen this article a number of times, I'd like to go through it to see what everyone has to say on the subject. Warning: This is just stupidly, ludicrously long. it takes an existing 5-page article and tears it apart nearly sentence-by-sentence.

He goes back through each of the sections - Stance, Arguments, Philosophy, etc - and includes quotes from the articles and his own impressions/thoughts about them. There's a section covering some of the individual complaints that were mentioned and things like PHP's OOP model and security.

Security has become more of a hot topic in the PHP community recently and PHPMaster.com has pulled together a list of resources you can read up on to get some great ideas for securing your application.

The unfortunate truth of the matter is there's no excuse for [the LinkedIn, Yahoo!, eHarmony and Last.fm] leaks; they would not have been possible if simple, well-known security precautions were taken. Are you protecting yourself and your applications by guarding against SQL-injection attacks? Are you filtering and validating user input? Are you properly hashing user passwords? I hope so! If not, read some of the security-focused articles PHPMaster has published throughout the past year and apply these best practices to your code today!

Articles in their list include:

• Why You Should Use Bcrypt to Hash Stored Passwords
• Input Validation Using Filter Functions
• Multi-Factor Authentication with PHP and Twilio
• Monitoring File Integrity

Check out the rest of the post for links to other great articles.

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.