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In the support forum 3 years ago (http://en.forums.wordpress.com/topic/markdown?replies=4#post-149260) someone asked about markdown support in wordpress.com. (I know it is a standard plugin in self-hosted wordpress)
It was rather harshly rejected, later explained as being too CPU intensive. But it was also hinted it could be introduced as a paid upgrade.
Now I would be willing to pay a reasonable upgrade to get markdown support. Any chances we might see this, and if so when?
Andrew
The fact that you've found a 3-year-old thread on the subject and we still don't have it available as a paid upgrade should probably tell you something. But, I've also learned never to say never.
Well, as they say:
1. There's no harm in asking.
2. CPU issues 3 years ago may be peanuts today (assuming some sort of Moore's law) and
3. There might be a market for WordPress.com enabling "standard plugins" that is plugins in the standard WordPress distribution, enabled based on a credits scheme just as other features available on WordPress.com.
I love WordPress.com and have moved from a selfhosted WordPress blog to a WordPress.com hosted blog exactly for the simplicity such as not having to worry about updates etc. But I often just want to jot something down and for me Markdown is the perfect compromise between text markup and readability. I can have both formatting and in particular web-links which are readable, because I can move the URL (which might be long and unreadable) to the end of the document. You just have to love that.
Missing Markdown is the single missing feature for me, which actually might make me go away from WordPress.com and look for another provider, although I would only do this as a last resort.
Andrew
Just saying ... You can use the HTML editor here, or you can write in an offline markup editor or plain text editor if you wish and the copy and paste into the HTML tab in the editor.
Sorry, that is not the point. I know enough ways I could work around this. I could write in markdown in a decent editor, and then filter or convert to html and upload. I could as you said cut and paste. I could use a visual html editor. All this is true, but they are all workarounds for the fact that the markdown text markup is easy to learn, and still looks good when read in a text editor. Compare this to the html code generated from the visual editor on WordPress, in particular if you have a number of long URLs.
I want to stress that I am not asking, please *develop* and *implement* feature X I really need it. I am asking to enable a feature that, as far as I know, is a part of the standard distribution of WordPress to be enabled and I am also willing to pay for this.
The main issue some time ago appears to have been the lack of CPU resources. This might have changed by todays standards and it might now be feasible to enable this feature.
Again, I really enjoy the simplicity of WordPress.com and I do not mind that I have limited possibilities as a tradeoff for the benefit that I have not got to take care of updates, configuration etc. I work in IT myself and I know what it means to support a service and keep it running and I also know that asking for new features means more than to just flick a switch, hence my offer to pay for it.
Andrew
Andrew, although I agree with you 100%, I think that wordpress won't do this, simply due to the lack of an audience willing to pay for such an upgrade. I might, however, be wrong.
As long as we don't have markdown as a paid upgrade, you can always resort to pandoc online to convert your Markdown or Extended Markdown to HTML and copy-paste it into WordPress' editor.
Markdown support was removed from the core wordpress.org download in version 2.0 (we're on 3.1 now). While there are markdown plugins available on wordpress.org, they're not by Automattic and therefore not 'standard', or official, or likely to be adopted on wordpress.com. They have exactly the same status as all the plugins we don't have access to.
Setting up and maintaining your own wordpress install is considerably less hassle than it was a few years ago, so if you're desperate for this feature and it's a while since you self-hosted it might be worth giving it another go.
Too bad there's no support. I'm switching to another platform for that very reason right now.
As for the CPU hog...come on...your read/write ratio would have to be turned upside down and inside out for that to be a problem.
Hell if it is indeed to much load to generate it upon saving, just generate it it from markdown when the first read happens (OK, OK, that'll probably be true for nearly every post really soon after it is published since I expect most people to preview their posts.).
To sum up: It's too bad that there's no general decent integration of the simple markup languages (markdown, textile, rest) here on wordpress.com :(
I have given up. While I will stick with WordPress.com (for the the time being, I tried self hosting, but I just can't be bothered to administer yet another service, although I must admit, it has become a lot better, since I last tried),
I am using a workaround which involves passing everything through the markdown filter to created html. I keep the markdown in an html comment, so that I can edit and update it later. Not really elegant, but it works.
Again, I also do not buy the performance argument, as I asked for a paid upgrade and the money can be used to pay for the performance hit.
The argument on not having control over the plugin is also somewhat weak I assume that wordpress.com does not have control over a lot of things it is using (e.g. php ;)
But again I have given up. I have my workflow and while I do not like it, it's probably the best I have for now.
Andrew
Just wanted to leave a note that I would also love to see Markdown supported in the future. I am seriously considering moving the site as Markdown is a growing part of my workflow.
The Dailypost blog on WordPress is asking to blog what feature you are missing from WordPress.com. If its Markdown you might consider posting a blog post. Put the tags "PostADay" or "PostAWeek" into your article and refer back to this thread to maximize publicity.
Andrew
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andrewmaier
