PHP Markdown
Monday, August 14th, 2006I have recently become increasingly annoyed with the WYSIWYG editor included with WordPress, at least its current version. Due to various problems it makes it practically impossible to type escaped html markup into a post, which is utterly unacceptable for my needs.
I have however, found I much better solution – PHP Markdown. PHP Markdown disables all the annoying WP auto paragraph functions for plain text editing, and adds its own special plain text markup system which is very similar to that of MediaWiki. It also offers extremely easy code insertion/escaping by simply inserting back-ticks (`) inside of a paragraph, or indenting a line four spaces outside of one.
You can also create headings as easy as
# This makes a heading 1
One other plus is that it does not seem to break past posts that used pure HTML, so you can safely activate it on a blog without utterly destroying all your old posts.
So far I am very pleased with it, and I probably won’t switch to a WYSIWYG editor again anytime soon.
I cannot say that I am a big fan of WP’s RichText editor either. I’ll be looking into this plugin…normally I just use plain HTML.
I agree, the wordpress editor is kind of bad. IMO, browser based rich text editors are usually bad. Have you heard of textile? It is the same concept, it just uses a different syntax. http://textism.com/tools/textile/
That’s what I usually use for posting to my blog. It works pretty well. The only pain is memorizing the commands.
I have looked at textile before, but I really don’t like its syntax very much (as you said, its a pain to memorize keywords).
With markdown, there are no keywords. Everything is just paragraph breaks, pound signs, and asterisks.