Skip to content
Jan’s Blog

Easy Markdown

By Jan’s photo Jan Boddez
• bddz.be/DKX

A little while ago, I switched one of my blogs from WordPress to ClassicPress (a fork of WordPress 4.9, so before the block editor was introduced) and back.

There’s two reasons ClassicPress didn’t cut it for me:

  • Quite a few plugins—even those that have nothing to do with the block editor—require core functions introduced in WordPress 5.0 or newer, which means a lot of “shims” (or “polyfills”) are needed to get them to work
  • No (official) PHP 8 support—this, for me, was the reason to go back to WordPress proper

Anyhow, while on ClassicPress, I needed something other than Jetpack’s Markdown module to render my “Notes” to good ol’ HTML. (ClassicPress and Jetpack aren’t exactly friends.)

(My Notes section is my lil’ microblog, my own personal “Twitter,” and—in theory—plain-text only. In theory, because I quickly adopted Markdown’s syntax to add semantics, and later on started to just render notes as HTML, which is where Jetpack came in.)

Either way, I found an alternative, or so I thought, in a plugin called “Easy Markdown,” which it turned out actually was Jetpack’s Markdown module, plus some JavaScript editor—I think—on top.

So I “forked” said plugin and got rid of the JS “fluff”—or rather, I once more “stole” Jetpack’s Markdown bits, and scrubbed them of everything Gutenberg.

And since I didn’t really use or need any of Jetpack’s other offerings, I stuck with the custom plugin, even after returning to WordPress. Running version WordPress 6.0.2 right now, and things still just work. Marvelous.

Replies

  1. Aaron Davis on

    … bookmarked this!

    Via collect.readwriterespond.com, in reply to Easy Markdown.

  2. Jan Boddez on

    […] I exclusively used WordPress’s classic editor and Jetpack’s Markdown module (or Easy Markdown), syndicating Markdown to, e.g., Mastodon, was easy. (Both plugins store unparsed Markdown in post_content_filtered, so I’d cross-post […]

    Via jan.boddez.net, in reply to Easy Markdown.