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Joomla Markdown Extension

As a result of a request from a reader of this blog, I have prepared a new Joomla extension which I have christened “jMarkdown” to partner with jTextile. Why would I do this? Well I remain absolutely convinced that even the best of the WYSIWYG editors for blogs and CMS are basically useless when it comes to editing text or restyling content. Wherever possible I use “Textile markup”:http://textism.com/tools/textile/ for content intended for publication via the HTML. This is a matter of personal preference, many others use “Markdown”:http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/. Elsewhere in this blog you’ll find jTextile, a Joomla 1.5 extension which supports the textile syntax

Anyway, jMarkdown allows you to prepare articles for Joomla 1.0 using the “Markdown”:http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/ syntax. jMarkdown, when activated, will convert the text into html for display purposes.

You can download jMarkdown “here”:http://s3.amazonaws.com/files.4results.biz/jMarkdown.zip. This is a prerelease version and does not include any documentation. Just install the extension and activate the plugin in your Joomla 1.5 site.

As usual feel free to comment or ask questions here.

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Joomla Textile Plugin

During the process of migrating a large Joomla site from 1.0 to 1.5 I ran into a problem. As usual with any sites with user editable content, I had steered away from using a WYSIWYG editor (I’ve yet to find one that actually works!) and have used Textile to format the content.

However, some serious Googling did not reveal a plugin for Joomla 1.5 to render the content. The original “mos Textile” mambot has disappeared and “rok Textile” does not work on 1.5

So I have lashed together a Joomla 1.5 plugin which will render textile markup correctly (including SmartyPants extensions).

Extension details:

  • I’ve called the plugin jTextile
  • It’s a BETA release
  • There is no documentation
  • There are no configuration options
  • It works on the content only
  • It is based on the work of others, thanks to their efforts
  • It can be downloaded from here

If there is any interest from out there, I’ll extend and support the plugin. Feel free to post comments or questions in this blog.