I recently covered a plugin called Gust, which brings the Ghost like admin panel into WordPress. Gust and Ghost both let you use HTML and Markdown in your posts. I really loved and got into Markdown as I was reading and writing about Ghost.
I first heard about Markdown when I received an email from Jetpack about its new features. Here’s the my favorite part of the mail:
Write more efficiently with Markdown
Since introducing Markdown on WordPress.com, we’ve had a lot of requests to bring it over to Jetpack. Well, queue the trumpets, start the drumroll, Markdown is here!
For those who don’t know, Markdown is a quick way to add formatted text without writing out any HTML. Markdown lets you compose links, lists, and other styles using regular characters and punctuation marks. If you want a quick, easy way to write and edit rich text without having to take your hands off the keyboard or learn a lot of complicated codes and shortcuts, then Markdown might be right for you. We do strongly suggest sticking with the “Text” tab in the Editor when using Markdown.
So, now even WordPress support Markdown with the help of its Jetpack plugin. You can easily enable Markdown module from the Jetpack option page.
What Is Markdown?
Just like WordPress, Markdown is an open-source plain text formatting syntax. Tons of websites, such as Stack Overflow and WordPress are using Markdown. It’s even easier than writing on a WYSIWYG and an HTML editor. You just need to write some basic text mark-up to render beautifully formatted text. You can visit their official project page at this link.
As you can see in above image, you can easily add a list to your posts by just adding following code:
* First Line. * Second Line. * Third Line.
will render:
- First Line.
- Second Line.
- Third Line.
and the following code will render an ordered (numbered) list:
1. First Line. 2. Second Line. 3. Third Line.
which looks like:
- First Line.
- Second Line.
- Third Line.
You can learn more about Markdown formatting syntax on their official project page at this link.
Jetpack’s Markdown module supports all the same formatting available on WordPress.com’s post-editor. I’m pretty interested about Markdown, as it makes a lot easy for me to create lists and stuff without writing same line again and again. You just need to add a star character before your line and that’s it.
Adding hashes before your text will render it as a headline. It’s all clean, and easy. I wonder if it’s the future of writing and formatting.