PHP Advent Seasoning

Ladies and gentlefolk, I give you the two-thousand and eight PHP Advent Calendar!

As an aside in a season that gets rudely interrupted every year with a huge, great party, the PHP Advent Calendar is adding to the fray. Some of the denizens of PHP are sharing their wisdom from a beat-up old soap box in our quiet, geeky corner of the Web.

The entire project was launched in a mad, two-day rush, which featured the guys with real talent setting up the server, propagating the DNS, and gathering the initial content. A couple of days after the first article, for my sins, I applied some style to the interface. Twenty-four hours of key-smacking later — and with a good dose of help from the indomitable Jon Gibbins — it was done.

The project is edited by Chris and Sean with nuts and bolts help from Jon. It is kindly sponsored by OmniTI. I have to tell you, with almost no time to get it done, deadlines looming, colleagues sweating, and the world in general turning far too fast, I’m pretty pleased with the result.

A single typeface is used throughout. It changes depending on availability, but this seemed like a good opportunity to stretch a face or two. (Writing that made me smile.)

Although we would have loved to license and use various typefaces not currently available in operating systems, there just wasn’t the time. Without knowing the full range of glyphs the content might need, the faces currently licensed for @font-face linking (many with slightly abridged character sets) might not have had the range we need. So, I chose Baskerville as the primary face with various fall-backs from there. Hopefully the epidemic of the Baskerville italic ampersand will ebb soon, but there are many worse things in life to see on an almost daily basis.

You might notice the use of the golden ratio, and an attempt to coerce our awkwardly independent browsers into rendering a baseline grid.

As always, the content was king, queen, barkeep and god: I veered away from images as decoration, considering them unnecessary. I hope nothing overshadows the reading experience. With that in mind the interface is fluid, with a minimum width to stop it all collapsing into a narrow abyss. Most significantly though, the content is genuinely interesting. There are some choice pieces over there, and if you’re interested in PHP at all, swing by, grab the feed, or follow ‘phpadvent’ Twitter for fast updates.