Add markdown support to support forum editor

[ahockley]

It would be nice to support Markdown in the support forum editor so that folks could post and reply using Markdown (and have that Markdown displayed as HTML upon submission).

[DrewAPicture]

Some markdown and special formatting is already supported, including backticks for code and quick links for Codex articles. Not sure how far the integrations extend though.

[ahockley]

Replying to DrewAPicture:

Some markdown and special formatting is already supported, including backticks for code and quick links for Codex articles. Not sure how far the integrations extend though.

Interesting. I noticed that a bulleted list (lines preceded by asterisks) didn't seem to be supported. I didn't experiment beyond that, figured it was worthy of discussion.

[obenland]

@dd32 Would the markdown library we used for plugin directory readmes work for this as well? How hard do you think would it be to integrate it?

[dd32]

Replying to obenland:

@dd32 Would the markdown library we used for plugin directory readmes work for this as well? How hard do you think would it be to integrate it?

Unfortunately I've got no idea.

I really question if Full Markdown is the correct option for the support forum though, it's not a syntax which is native to most support-seekers, and when you don't expect it, it can affect the content more than you might expect. To many of us, it's sane, but to a lot of others it's just the opposite.

Perhaps a more restricted set of markdown could be useful, lists, block quotes, etc. but even then..
Perhaps even a more restricted set of markdown could be better - bold/italic/lists
Perhaps maybe adopting the Slack format: *bold*, _italics_, ~strike~, `code`, ```pre-formatted```, >quote - at least that would mean we don't have yet-another format to deal with (Trac vs Slack vs Support Forums vs WordPress itself)

For support-seekers (which is the term I'm using here for not-regular-support-forum-users) A WYSIWYG interface with basic editing buttons (bold/italic/link/list/etc) is probably a better UI.

[netweb]

Replying to dd32:

Replying to obenland:

@dd32 Would the markdown library we used for plugin directory readmes work for this as well? How hard do you think would it be to integrate it?

Maybe ​https://github.com/stuttter/bbp-jp-markdown Use Jetpack's Markdown in bbPress Forums, Topics, and Replies

I really question if Full Markdown is the correct option for the support forum though, it's not a syntax which is native to most support-seekers, and when you don't expect it, it can affect the content more than you might expect. To many of us, it's sane, but to a lot of others it's just the opposite.

bbPress.org used to support markdown, it was buggy, I complained, a lot, this was back in the day when I was only contributing to bbPress by way of the support forums I believe and I had no idea back then what markdown was, some abstract term I'd never heard of that frustrated me no end.

Perhaps a more restricted set of markdown could be useful, lists, block quotes, etc. but even then..
Perhaps even a more restricted set of markdown could be better - bold/italic/lists
Perhaps maybe adopting the Slack format: *bold*, _italics_, ~strike~, `code`, ```pre-formatted```, >quote - at least that would mean we don't have yet-another format to deal with (Trac vs Slack vs Support Forums vs WordPress itself)

I'd love to see markdown added, a subset might be just what we need to such as the above, we'd need to ensure that it _is_ documented up front, maybe a collapsible item on the quicktags toolbar.

Hey @jjj, got any markdown words of wisdom here when it comes to integration with bbPress?

[johnjamesjacoby]

I think there's a sweet spot here, and GitHub has mostly nailed it IMO.

We want the convenience of WYSIWYG, simplicity of Markdown, but we (probably) don't want to commit to special formatting being saved in the database (otherwise we are committing to either supporting it forever or cleaning it out once we're over it years later.)

So...
...a toolbar with buttons...
...that insert Markdown in a textarea...
...with a preview...
...that saves to HTML...
...and converts back to Markdown on edit.

I think this is doable, and I think maybe the O2/P2 theme had support for some version of this (unless that's via Jetpack?)

Whatever we choose, we'll need to juggle the backtick support that comes natively in bbPress. It's still a modern variant of what came in bbPress 1.x (vs. some limited Markdown library.) I do see value in including Markdown in bbPress core, but I'd want something like above, and would want to deprecate the old backtick code at the same time.

[Clorith]

I'm more worried about average users than a subset of power users here.

As they are likely unfamiliar with markdown, having their texts suddenly be parsed and behave differently because they were unaware something they typed was markdown is a horrible experience. We now have a generic WYSIWYG, let's stick with that.