It’s easy to add Markdown support to WordPress. However, it does have a nefarious quirk. In fact, even if you can input Markdown text from the Text panel, and it gets rendered just fine in the blog, the harsh truth is that, as soon as you inadvertently switch to the Visual panel, all the white space in your code blocks gets wiped out, losing all the indentation you had put in.
This looks like a typical reason for writing a plugin to fix that.
Use a shell plugin
Given that I often need small WordPress adjustments like this one, in the past I developed one ring to rule them all: Custom Stuff.
(file wordpress/wp-content/plugins/custom-stuff/custom-stuff.php)
which is just a simple PHP script that basically declares itself as a WordPress plugin and all it does is to require other PHP scripts where the real action takes place.
Design a usable solution
What we need is a way to make WordPress aware that a post is written in Markdown thus no Visual editor will ever be allowed for it.
My solution is based on the user_can_richedit hook and the Shortcode API. It works like this:
- At the start of a Markdown text, you add the
- In editing mode, the hook handler determines whether or not a post begins with that shortcode. If it does, a
false is returned, thus effectively forbidding the Vsual editor.
- In reading mode, that shortcode is just replaced by an empty string.
Code
(file wordpress/wp-content/plugins/custom-stuff/no-richedit.php)
(file wordpress/wp-content/plugins/custom-stuff/custom-stuff.php)
Example
This is how WordPress looks like when the
This is how WordPress looks like when the
Only one thing to remember
There is only one thing to remember then. When adding a post, before introducing any relevant Markdown, switch to the Text panel, add the [no-richedit] shortcode and save a draft. Then the Visual editor won’t appear anymore for that post. (until you remove the shortcode and save again)
