PHP Markdown Plugin

by dusty

I love PlainText. It is versatile, functional, and just darn easy to use. However, some degree of formatting is often necessary. Enter Markdown by John Gruber.

Markdown is a text-to-HTML conversion tool for web writers. Markdown allows you to write using an easy-to-read, easy-to-write plain text format, then convert it to structurally valid XHTML (or HTML).

Thus, “Markdown” is two things: (1) a plain text formatting syntax; and (2) a software tool, written in Perl, that converts the plain text formatting to HTML.

I have been using Markdown for a long time to write almost everything. So I was quite happy to stumble across the PHP Markdown plugin for WordPress. Now I can write my posts directly in Markdown… no conversion needed.