SID-02456: Markdown support

Status:	Answered	TWiki version:	6.1.0	Perl version:
Category:		Server OS:		Last update:	5 years ago

Would TWiki look at supporting markdown as a markup language, Markdown has great tool support and is becoming a defacto markup language for developers

-- Fred Bowker - 2020-10-01

Discussion and Answer

Not at this time. Best to discuss at TWikiWithMarkdown.

-- Peter Thoeny - 2020-10-03

FredBowker, please chime in at TWikiWithMarkdown.

-- Peter Thoeny - 2020-10-04

Hi there. I actually looked at all the features of TWiki, and I think they are GREAT. It has all that I want in a Wiki... EXCEPT for being able to use MarkDown. I don't want to learn another/new-to-me language just for different Wiki, and I don't want all our team to have to do so as well. For me, this is a non-starter, and it's really too bad since it seems we would have LOVED TWiki for everything else it offers. However, I have to look elsewhere since it doesn't seem to be supported at this time. Could you please help open up the possibility of using TWiki in the future by having it support MarkDown? Note that I'm already jumping over to the "TWikiWithMarkdown" link above, but this is the one that popped up in Google first. Thank you.

-- TWiki Guest - 2021-01-25

Actually, it seems that I can't post to the "TWikiWithMarkDown" page with a Guest Login. I didn't realize that, and I'm getting User/Access Permission issue. I'll post my comment here about what users such as myself would be looking for. Here is the comment that couldn't go through over on that link above:

Hi there. I'm a new user who was about to install TWiki when I saw it doesn't support MarkDown. I think TWiki is the best Wiki out there (from what I can see so far), except it doesn't support MarkDown. I don't want to learn another/new-to-me language just for different Wiki, and I don't want all our team to have to do so as well. I want all my own content created to be created in MarkDown so I don't have to be converting it from one thing to another thing in the future. MarkDown has basically won the battle for being as human-readable as possible, and it's more portable as well. I don't need any interleaving of TML and MarkDown. For users with pages already done in TML, I'm sure they would want to keep them in TML (unless they use the converter option you mention above). But for new users coming on board TWiki, I would suggest having the option for only using MarkDown if we would like.

As for the question about the technical implications of the 4 above-mentioned scenarios, it seems the WYSIWIG editor could store data in MarkDown instead of TML. And then if we want to edit the raw MarkDown, we could. I understand not being able to edit existing topics that were already made in TML with MarkDown (unless you're willing to do a 1-time conversion to MarkDown, which as you point out could be a bit fragile), although I think some people may decide to do this one topic at a time when they are able to review it side-by-side. But for those of us coming in as new users, we don't have these issues. And unfortunately, we won't start with TWiki without the MarkDown support.

I hope this helps, and I look forward to using TWiki with Markdown in the future! Thank you.

Thanks again.

-- TWiki Guest - 2021-01-25

Thanks for the feedback, TWikiGuest.

FYI, we had an issue with registration on TWiki.org, this is now fixed. If you like to can register and participate at the TWikiWithMarkdown topic.

-- Peter Thoeny - 2021-01-26

While I agree that MarkDown is nowadays a defacto markup language for developers since it is widely used at github, stackoverflow, and other places, it is a big step down from the TML in terms of feature set. Compare TextFormattingRules with https://guides.github.com/features/mastering-markdown/ and you will see.

-- Peter Thoeny - 2021-01-26

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