December is drawing closer.

Thanksgiving marks in the US the beginning of the festive season that a lot of the members of the PHP-Community are celebrating in December. It’s the time of darkness but also of the warm lights. And – most important – it’s the time to gather the family and to celebrate.

Not everyone in the PHP-Community celebrates Christmas. Not everyone is from the US, not even from the Northern Hemisphere. The Community around this strange Web-Programming Language PHP is as diverse as the things you can do with the language. We are thousands of people of different cultural background, different gender, different knowledge, different continent, different timezone. Not two of us are the same. And yet we are all bound together by the use of that one language. Be it by using Drupal, Zend Framework, WordPress, Symfony, Joomla, Typo3, Magento or whatever else there might be out there, we are all using – PHP

We are one large distributed PHP-Family.

And as in every family there are differences and there is potential for conflicts. And there are times where we don’t talk to each other. But in the end we somehow manage to at least get along with one another. And the knowledge that we will get along with one another in the end and the knowledge that we all want to achieve awesome things binds us together. And as in every family we can achieve even greater things together.

During the first 24 Days in December we’ll have a post each day from different members of the community. Some are well known, others might be new to you but they all have a message to tell how awesome this PHP-Community is. And why this Community is so important to everyone involved with PHP.

So let’s take a moments time and see what the next 24 Days will bring us.