Markdown QuickTags: WordPress plugin for Markdown lovers

Introducing Markdown Quicktags, a new WordPress plugin for Markdown lovers! If you edit your blog in Markdown, whether you publish that way or not, this plugin will make your life almost 37% better. It’s quickly turning out to be one of the coolest things I think I’ve ever done!

It replaces the default QuickTags in the WordPress HTML editor with a set of Markdown-optimized tags, with plenty of extra features. I had mentioned discovering a non-intrusive way to edit the WordPress QuickTags the other day, and then my insomnia took it to this level. I basically put most of my favorite features of TextMate into a textarea. Auto pairing and selection wrapping, list generation from multipe lines, indentation preservation, parsing multiple urls from pasted text, and more. The buttons are really just the beginning.

Note that this plugin in BETA. It has a ways to go, and you’ll probably find glitches. Please give it a try, though, and let me know what you think, either in the comments here, or contact me directly.

Once I feel like this is stable, I’ll add it to the WordPress plugin repository (check it out in the WordPress plugins) and you’ll be able to get automatic updates. For now, please check back to get the latest versions. The download link will always be up to date throughout the blog, and when I push the next tagged release, I’ll start a changelog on the project page.

The next step is to modify this into a Safari Extension which will allow any text field to become a Markdown Editor. The basic editing features will probably also turn into a jQuery plugin. For now, WordPress users who love Markdown should go get it!

[donate]