Matt Read posted a quick mention of the release of PHP Markdown on the WordPress Support forums so I thought I would pass this along to everyone.
Michel Fortin has ported over John Gruber’s original Markdown into a plugin for WordPress as well as a tool for bBlog, Smarty, and other PHP-based tools. Here is some information directly from Michel’s site:
PHP Markdown is a port of the original Markdown program from John Gruber.
Markdown is a text-to-HTML conversion tool for web writers. Markdown allows you to write using an easy-to-read, easy-to-write plain text format, then convert it to structurally valid XHTML (or HTML).
The overriding design goal for Markdown’s formatting syntax is to make it as readable as possible. The idea is that a Markdown-formatted document should be publishable as-is, as plain text, without looking like it’s been marked up with tags or formatting instructions. While Markdown’s syntax has been influenced by several existing text-to-HTML filters, the single biggest source of inspiration for Markdown’s syntax is the format of plain text email.
PHP Markdown is available on Michel’s site for download. Note that if you are currently using WordPress, Markdown is already bundled, but this is likely a more up-to-date version.
Happy Markdown, everyone!
