For those of you who’ve never heard of Markdown, it’s a plain text to HTML converter, relying on standardized but natural formatting syntax in the plain text. To learn the basic commands read Web content with markdown post by Hongkiat. To take it further I suggest to check out Markdown creator John Gruber’s Markdown Syntax as well.

WordPress users have always experienced some issues with the conversion of WordPress default WYSIWYG (“what you see is what you get”) editor data to HTML. Markdown, in comparison, performs better in terms of the HTML output and has been recently popularized by Ghost, an open-source blogging platform launched in 2013 on Kickstarter.

As of today there are three main options for Ghost-like blogging in WordPress, utilizing Markdown:

  1. Splitdown, available on Github only as opposed to WordPress plugin directory. For a rundown of its features read the following article by Hongkiat: Splitdown: A Ghost-like editor for WordPress.
  2. Gust WordPress plugin is a completely separate admin panel that will run parallel to the WP default editor at YOURURL/gust. It has just been published and needs some refinement and extra features, but it’s an exciting project to watch out for.
  3. WP-Markdown allows Markdown to be enabled in posts, comments and bbPress forums.WordPress plugin doesn’t offer the practical horizontal split view like Splitdown or Gust, but is the most robust and refined solution for WordPress at the moment.

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