Use Markdown with Wordpress

Published on March 29, 2010.

By default, Wordpress only allows you to write your posts in HTML (in the case you have not noticed the built-in WYSIWYG editor creates and renders HTML). However, there are many ways to mark up your texts on the web (HTML is not the only one). My favorite is Markdown.

The why

I think that using more document-oriented markup syntaxes has many benefits. For example :

• Better separation between content and form, which undoubtedly leads to an improvement in interoperability and durability of your data.
• Having fun with something different (but not really new).

The how (with Wordpress)

Before everything be sure to have the authorization to install new plugins on your Wordpress-powered web site.

First, you need to render your markdown texts to HTML. This is where “Markdown for WordPress and bbPress” comes. This plugin will use a PHP markdown parser to render your text. As markdown accepts HTML, you don’t need to worry about your old posts: they will be displayed as they always did.

And… that’s it! Don’t forget to take a look at the official Markdown syntax page.

If you want a nicer way to type your posts (for example a real-time render of your text), you could use my Wordpress plugin called WP WMD Admin. It will replace your Wordpress text input by WMD, the WYSIWYM Markdown editor.

The limits

Markdown is nice for blogs, or short descriptions. Although it’s not really in the scope of this post, I think that Markdown misses some important markup element. The firsts that come to my mind are:

• No table of content. It looks like markdown supports the [TOC] command since 2.0 (source)
• No footnotes.
• No color.