blog

I like many others am a big fan of John Gruber’s Markdown, a simple typesetting spec for entering text in a clean, legible plain-text fashion and outputting to (X)HTML. Michel Fortin did the fabulous job of porting the Markdown engine to PHP, making it a plugin for WordPress, bBlog, and TextPattern.

I’ve been using Markdown for all my blog posts here. Recently, though, I was in charge of a bbPress bulletin board (the “less is more” sister project to WordPress) for the Shoreland Scav Hunt team, and wanted to use Markdown formatting there. And I wasn’t the only one wanting to do this.

With some experimenting and research into the filters in the bbPress text flow (different than the WordPress one), I was able to make Markdown work in bbPress. This involved adding a special bbPress plugin wrapper to Michel Fortin’s PHP Markdown Extra. I’ve rereleased this plugin as Markdown for WordPress and bbPress, available at both wordpress.org and bbpress.org. Enjoy!