I knew I wanted to have some sort of simple text editing with this blog. Rendering out the body text was going to take some basic conversion from CR-LF to HTML br tags was going to be required. I was at a meetup recently where the presenter had talked about how he had shifted his own personal note taking over to using Markdown, exclusively. Markdown sounded like the way to go.
After a little bit of research, I stumbled upon PHP Markdown by Michel Fortin over on GitHub. It seemed to be the exact solution I needed.
That said, I was tripping over myself trying to get it integrated. I have noticed that there are many add-ons for PHP that use Composer to install and load the add-on. I haven't had much luck with getting this working on my WAMP server at home. Probably another round of learning needed on another day.
After some trial and error, I was able to get it all working. I needed this at the start of the view post page:
require_once 'Michelf/MarkdownExtra.inc.php';
use Michelf\MarkdownExtra;
I am using MarkdownExtra as I need the code block support to post things like this exact post. It only took 2 lines to call the Markdown to HTML transform.
$parser = new MarkdownExtra;
$postBody = $parser->transform($postBody);
$postBody was read from the database, then transformed before rendering.
