Testing the waters with Markdown in WordPress

Authoring WordPress using Markdown with WP Githuber MD

I use Markdown (MD) frequently on-the-job for writing software documentation, so I wanted to explore the possibility of using it for writing posts and pages on my WordPress (WP) site. This post will just be a simple write-up of my findings to date.

In a bit of meta-posting, I’m writing this post using WP Githuber MD for the first time.

Full disclosure – I am new to WordPress in general so the opinions and results here should be taken with a grain of salt.

Plugin

My initial WP installation did not come out-of-the-box with any support for authoring in MD, so my first step was enabling support with a plugin. A search of the plugin library showed WP Githuber MD had the most reviews and installations, so I decided it would be a good starting point.

Note: As of this post, my WP site is running on 6.1.1 and the plugin showed that it was not verified to be compatible with my version. I am giving it a try anyway and hoping for the best.

Markdown support

My usage of Markdown is usually focused on a small subset of the available features like:

• Headings and other outlining features
• Code blocks
• Links
• Ordered and unordered lists

Let’s see how these markdown features ae supported in WP Githuber MD.

Headings, links, and lists

I make frequent use of headings via the MD #, ##, ### syntax and WP Githuber MD supports these with ease. Likewise, it supports the creation of links using the [link_text](url) format.

Lists are also easily created using the * or 1. syntax for unordered and ordered, respectively.

• This
• is an
• unordered list

1. But this
2. list is
3. ordered

Code blocks and syntax highlighting

My hope is to blog about some software development topics in the future and that means code examples! I wanted to see how well WP Githuber MD handles these.

C#

Most of my professional work is spent in C# so let’s use that as the example:

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Threading.Tasks;
using Microsoft.AspNetCore.Hosting;
using Microsoft.Extensions.Configuration;
using Microsoft.Extensions.Hosting;
using Microsoft.Extensions.Logging;

namespace Server
{
    public class Program
    {
        public static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            CreateHostBuilder(args).Build().Run();
        }

        public static IHostBuilder CreateHostBuilder(string[] args) =>
            Host.CreateDefaultBuilder(args)
                .ConfigureWebHostDefaults(webBuilder =>
                {
                    webBuilder.UseStartup<Startup>();
                });
    }
}

Future Topics

At some point I’d like to further explore the capabilities of the WP Githuber MD plugin, especially

• Theme support
• Code visualization