On the Symfony blog today there's a new post spotlighting a site, written in Symfony, that was created to help those affected by the flooding in Nashville, Tennessee.

Though the city of Nashville was physically damaged [from the flooding], the spirit of the people was not. The local technology community quickly sprung into action to produce DonateNashville.org, a fully featured symfony 1.4 application to help organize flood relief efforts throughout the city. The project manager, Chip Hayner, took the time to answer some questions about the experience.

The site was built in a matter of days and within twenty-four hours they already had over one thousand visitors and, by the time it was all said and done, the help of 35 other people and around ten different bits of technology to get it all done. And, of course, it's all been open sourced.

Today is "Ada Lovelace Day" - a day set aside to be an international day of blogging dedicated to spotlighting those women in science and technology fields that you feel have gone above and beyond and should be recognized for it. Here's more from the official site:

Women's contributions often go unacknowledged, their innovations seldom mentioned, their faces rarely recognized. We want you to tell the world about these unsung heroines. [...] If women need female role models, let's come together to highlight the women in technology that we look up to. Let's create new role models and make sure that whenever the question "Who are the leading women in tech?" is asked, that we all have a list of candidates on the tips of our tongues.

Members of the PHP community have already started making their blog posts (and tweets) about the day - here's a list:

• PHPWomen - the Ada Lovelace Pledge
• Zend Developer Zone - Finding Ada in the PHP Community
• Chris Hartjes - Ada Lovelace Day - Celebrating Women In Technology
• Lorna Mitchell - Ada Lovelace Day: Kathy Sierra
• Rob Allen - In honour of Ada Lovelace
• Derick Rethans - Finding Ada
• Lukas Smith - Finding Ada
• Elizabeth Naramore - For Ada Lovelace Day, My Ode to uberChick
• BinaryKitten - Ada Lovelace day 2009 - @LornaJane #ALD09
• Elizabeth Smith - Ada Lovelace Day 2009
• Stefan Koopmanschap - Ada Lovelace Day - Women in PHP

The CodeIgniter blog has posted their latest "Community Voice" feature highlighting an article from Michael Wales:

This week, our Community Voice author is Michael Wales, a programmer, a father, an aspiring author, and an award winning Airman. For the past 3 years, he's been focusing the majority of his time on CodeIgniter. He is among the most consistent contributors to the community, has released numerous libraries and tutorials, and is one of the most highly sought after freelancers within the community.

Michael talks about some of his experiences in developing web applications - both CodeIgniter driven and not. He notes that the framework does allow him to look at things from "outside the box" a bit more since it takes the hard bits off his shoulders.

In this new blog post, Jared White spotlights a feature of the Willowgarden application platform - the template modes.

Unlike many Web frameworks, Willowgarden doesn't provide a different template for every action. All actions are provided via a single template file for the entire page. This works because of the concept of template modes.

He includes a quick example of these templates, creating two files to show the difference - one with the normal templating methodology and the other showing the difference Willowgarden's templates make (more concise and more flexible).