Markdown is a wonderful simple and lightweight markup language. The basic idea is that it looks just like normal text. I actually find Markdown’s relative non WYSIWIGness to be an advantage because it allows concentrating more on communicating ideas than getting distracted by too many visual bells and whistles.
Thanks to Michel Fortin‘s excellent PHP Markdown WordPress plugin you can use Markdown for posts in your WordPress blog.
If you’re sick of using WYSIWIG editors, then I’m sure it’s worth trying Markdown.
Frank,
I don’t immediately understand why not using WordPress non-WYSIWYG editor. Could you try and convince me that it’s worth moving to Markdown?
Hey Yves, good to hear from you! Hmmm, I guess this post didn’t convince you! 😉
OK, I’ll give it another shot. All the advantages of Markdown come from it being a human readable text format. Reading Markdown “source code” is easy, even if you aren’t displaying it in a browser. HTML is ugly to look at! It’s much easier to write Markdown while only using the keyboard. I try to avoid the mouse if at all possible. Preparing posts written in Markdown can be done in any editor, on any device, at any time (off-line, etc.). Good old *nix text utilities work better on Markdown than HTML (grep, sed, …). Reusing texts, written in Markdown, on Wikis, Github, Twitter, etc. is easier than straight HTML.
BTW, it’s a real pain that I can’t write WordPress comments in Markdown.
To be honest, I also spent a little more time looking at MarkDown and it seems that, even if I like HTML (at least, I like it more than the ugly WYSIWYG editor of WordPress), it could be a little faster of a little easier to write posts with it. I would just try and check if it does the same kind of HTML re-massaging that the WP editor does (it seems they don’t like some HTML tags and always want to replace them, etc.) I’ll probably try it in the near future.
Ok, it could be nice. I tried it.
But there are issues for a WordPress user. It’s still not very polished in terms of integration in WP (some features are set by modifying variable values in the code rather than by a setup screen) but the most annoying issue is the way it has to be used: Unset the visual editor, then the only interface is Markdown. That’s some kind of commitment to the plugin that is requested here. It’s a pity it could not be simply a matter of having a
Sure, it works, but it would need to be tested on a web site I do not depend on too heavily. And the transition would be a bit annoying (what happens to MD posts when you remove the plugin, what happens to old posts when you install the plugin, and all that).
The added readability is noticeable though.