I consider the Markdown plugin to be a necessary addition to each and every EE site that I develop, and so I’ve taken it upon myself to update the existing plugin to use PHP Markdown Extra by Michel Fortin.  This should be used as a replacement for the current plugin, rather than an additional one.

If you’re unfamiliar with the benefits that PHP Markdown Extra provides, please check out http://www.michelf.com/projects/php-markdown/extra/.  To sum it up, here are the new features:

* Use Markdown inside HTML blocks
* Add id attribute to headers
* Tables
* Definition lists
* Footnotes
* Abbreviations

There shouldn’t be any issues with the plugin, since all I’ve done is overwritten the old Markdown code with the new version, and changed some of the text in the plugin information section.  Enjoy!

Download Now!

Update: 10/10/08 - Plugin now uses Markdown Extra 1.2.2. I also stripped out some extra code that was only used for WordPress compatibility. And, since the forum will not let me upload the file due to the “invalid content for its MIME type” error, you will need to download the file from the URL above.

Will this add “markdown” as a formatting option in the custom field setup?

PS: w00t HU Bisons!

Omigosh, I was *JUST* thinking about this last night.

Now, we’ll go see if it works with markypants too.

jrtowell - 23 May 2007 11:45 PM

Will this add “markdown” as a formatting option in the custom field setup?

PS: w00t HU Bisons!

It will do everything that the original Markdown plugin did.  So in short, yes it will

I put the tag around my {body} in my main page templat and then put some list entries and they were not converted.

What am I doing wrong?

Erin Dalzell - 12 November 2007 11:25 AM

I put the tag around my {body} in my main page templat and then put some list entries and they were not converted.

What am I doing wrong?

Can you paste your code here?

Rather than using the tags in the template, you may want to try setting markdown as the default formatting option for the {body} field.  See here:

http://expressionengine.com/docs/cp/admin/weblog_administration/custom_fields_edit.html

You’ll need to click the Edit List button and make sure that Markdown is turned on.  Then confirm the changes and before you save the custom field, check the box next to “Update all existing section entries with your new formatting choice?”

You should be able to use Markdown formatting without using the {exp:markdown} tags in the template.

Awesome! That worked great!

I love the fact that EE let’s you choose your desired formatting. It’s such a flexible feature.

However, I still can’t manage to type in links, the official way (http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax#link )

eg. [Google Homepage] (http://www.google.com)

should render as:

<a href=“http://www.google.com>Google Homepage</a>

Instead, EE+MDplugin renders it as:

[Google Homepage] (<a href=“http://www.google.com”>[Google Homepage] (http://www.google.com)</a>)

it looks like you have EE set to parse your fields for links. It should be fine if you turn that off (Weblog Admin->Weblog Management->Edit Prefs->Weblog Posting Prefs).

Hi Brian, thanks for your answer.

I did check and tried that setting. However, if I turn it off, EE doesn’t render anything at all (except my non-link related Markdown tags, these are rendered OK). The markdown-link just appears as plain text:

[Google Homepage] (http://www.google.com)

I have tried putting the {exp:markdown}{/exp:markdown} tags around my body, but that didn’t change a thing either.

In the field formatting itself (custom field settings) - is that set to “none”?

No, the “formatting” dropdown underneath my body entry field is set to “Markdown”.

Garrulus - 20 December 2007 04:06 PM

No, the “formatting” dropdown underneath my body entry field is set to “Markdown”.

Ahhh I figured it out. There shouldn’t be a space between your [] and your (). Remove that and it works

Oops - there’s one more thing actually - looks like you have to have a title in there as well or it doesn’t work.  So this works:

[Google Homepage](http://www.google.com “Google”)

This doesn’t:

[Google Homepage](http://www.google.com)

Maybe it’s his way of furthering web standards

Ooops

Do I get some credit for being a total beginner with EE and Markdown?

Hey sure why not! I just started using Markdown myself - it’s pretty cool.  You can actually leave on url and email parsing as long as you form those links properly - which is nice so you can automatically obscure your email addresses with javascript.

Many thanks for the Markdown Extra plugin. I’m in the process of switching to ExpressionEngine and Markdown support is vitally important to me.

My own tests have borne out the experience of previous posts regarding the rendering of links—the title attribute (which is optional in Markdown) is mandatory in this implementation.

I was also wondering why Markdown’s reference-style links don’t appear to be supported. I prefer reference links because they make the Markdown-formatted text much easier to read. Is there any possibility of adding support for reference links?