Markdown conundrum
Have had first-class markdown support in core on the agenda for the last few years. Unfortunately, finding a generic solution and a sponsor has been elusive.
Use Cases
Before we get to implementation options, these are the Use Cases i’ve been looking at:
Scenario one: complete replacement of richtext
Client has a thing for markdown; all rich text areas need to be replaced with text boxes.
Scenario two: replace some rich text areas with markdown
Client wants some specific properties enabled with markdown
Scenario three: mixed editor choices
Some editors want markdown, others want to fall back to rich text
Problems
The implementation problems:
- presenting a formtool to users that enables markdown
- storing markdown/html in the database and roundtrip parsing
- rendering markdown in the view
Possible Plugin Approaches
Scenario one
- override
./formtools/richtext.cfcwith an editor dedicated to Markdown (or TextArea); this will replace all RTF editors - store all data as markdown
- use a post-processor on the view to render property as HTML
Scenario two
- add a new
./formtools/markdown.cfcwith an editor dedicated to Markdown (or TextArea) - update relevant properties to use the markdown form tool
- store specific property as markdown
- use a post-processor on the view to render property as HTML
Scenario three
- add a new
./formtools/markdown.cfcwith an editor dedicated to Markdown (or TextArea) - provide a switch in the UI for users to select an editor
- store data as either HTML or markdown; round trip to and from markdown is likely to be less than perfect
- if data is stored as markdown, use a post-processor on the view to render property as HTML
Note this Scenario significantly increases effort here; probably something that should be sidelined until there is a need for it.
Markdown Checklist
Anyone have a good recommendation for Markdown processing in Java?
- must handle GitHub markdown extensions; namely fenced code blocks
- java class; rather than something like
pandoc
h/t