Thanksgiving in the US marks 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.

These were the words Andreas Heigl used in his opening post on this site, published on the 25th of November 2015, almost 5 years ago.

His goal at the time was simple; reach out to his extended, distributed, PHP-Family (or PHPamily for short) and bring together as many diverse and interesting thoughts and ideas from our community, in one central place, for us to share with each other, learn from each other, and support each other.

A lot has changed over the past 5 years, life, as we know it now, is very different from then. Many of us are dealing with new and interesting challenges, both in our personal and professional lives. And that’s the beauty of sharing stories from our community, as Andreas so eloquently put it back in 2015.

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 bind us together. And as in every family, we can achieve even greater things together.

This year marks the 5th edition of the 24 Days in December site, and we’d like to take this opportunity to invite you to share your stories with us. We really hope we can bring fresh voices to the forefront, so if you’ve never written for a PHP related publication, this is the perfect opportunity to do so.

But what to write? Well, many of our previous contributors have written about the community, or open-source in general, or the way the modern web is changing how we live. Some authors picked a technical PHP topic that they would like to share because 24 Days in December is primarily aimed at PHP developers. Others shared something specific to the year that had passed, and what made it interesting for them. You can find a lot of inspiration in the past posts from previous years. The point is, this site is for you, our extended PHPamily, so share whatever you feel is important for us to think about as this year comes to a close.

Whether you want to write about something technical that is related to plain PHP, a fully-fledged and integrated Framework like Symfony, Laminas or Laravel, something about your favorite CMS like WordPress, Drupal, Typo3 or Concrete5, or something that relates to higher-level concepts, like open source, the PHP community in general, or your specific experiences as a person working in STEM, we are open to it, and encourage you to contribute.

If you would like to contribute to this year’s edition, email us at info AT 24daysindecember DOT net, or contact us via Twitter at @24DaysInDec.