Anna Filina has a new post showing how you can integrate a documentation format that's become a bit more popular recently (due partially to its increased use on github), Markdown, into a Symfony application.

I needed to create a number of static help pages in three languages in a Symfony 1.4 application. Using the XLIFF translation files seemed absurd, since I knew that I will include a lot of HTML. [...] And so, I decided to create partials using the following structure: _docs/{lang}/{title}.php. This method would organize my pages nicely and will only load what is needed. Then, I remembered that we were planning to hire a technical writer for the rest of the manual. I wanted to make his life as easy as possible and the source files easy to read for everyone.

She found the solution in Markdown and has included a step-by-step guide to getting it integrated with Symfony using this parser. It's loaded as a helper and used to parse the partial view's content. You can find a quick guide to Markdown on the Daring Fireball website.