When I first started working on Markdown Code For WordPress, the whole point of the plugin was to create an extremely simple solution for making it easy for me to replace `lines of code` without needing to hop into the visual editor, or to install a larger plugin with full markdown support.

Over the past couple of months, the plugin has received a little bit of refactoring, some good feedback of which I hope to implement (but it’s very low priority side project so, y’know..), and a pull request to simplify the code even more.

Love it.

However, I’ve gotten a bit used to the plugin (and markdown), so I’ve ended up adding support for two new markdown features into the plugin.

Markdown Code For WordPress: Strong and Emphatic

In short, the latest release of the plugin, specifically `0.3.0`, now has support for strong tags and emphasis tags.

Markdown Code For WordPress

This means that you can now do the following:

  • If you want to display a set of words in a code tag, then surround it with backticks.
  • If you want to display a set of words in an strong (or bold) tag, place two asterisk on either end of the words.
  • If you want to display a set of words in an emphasis (or italic) tag, place one asterisk on either end of the words.

The plugin offers this support in both post content and in responding to comments.

The funny thing is this plugin is now getting to the point where it’s obviously doing more than offering support for markdown code, but it’s not really mature enough to fully call it markdown. At any rate, I may be changing the name of in the future.

For now, I’ve left a TODO in the code for anyone else that’s curious about the plans for the plugin:

TODO

At this point, the plugin is getting to perform multiple string operations when it first started out focusing
only on code tags. Eventually, this will need to do two things:

1. Write the modified data to the database to improve retrieval and performance
2. Consider going the parsing route (though I do feel that’s a bit heavy handed for such a small subset of Markdown)

And this is why the plugin is far from sitting at `1.0`.

Download It (Or Offer a Pull Request)

You can grab the latest version of the code on GitHub or download a zip file of the plugin directly.

I’d also like to give props to GeertDD for simplifying the regular expressions in the previous of the plugin to make the overall code significantly leaner. Open source isn’t bad, is it? :)