textile, markdown suggestions

rubyonrails-talk
1

I have a text area in one of my scaffolds that is inserted into a div element on one of my rails pages.

Right now I can white HTML in the text area and have it show with the respective formatting when I view my page. However, I don't want to use HTML, I want to use some markup language. Some that I've heard of are texitle and markdown.

Does anybody have any suggestions on which one to use?

Then, how do I serialize the markup language to HTML when the page renders?

It would be cool if the text area had sometime of menu bar for formatting that inserted the appropriate markup language for the user.

I just want a quick implementation of this and I don't want to use a full CMS.

Any ideas?

2

This is pretty much the same thing I was trying to get at with the thread I started (which currently has no responses) with the subject:

embedding a wiki/wiki functionality

eggie5 wrote:

3

Well,

So far, in my scaffold, If I just write my page with the textile syntax and save it, it will be rendered to HTML if I just run the following command in my view:

<%= RedCloth.new(@press_release.body).to_html %>

So, that's pretty cool, now I just need a WYSIWYG type control to write the textile for me.

Alex

4

I've looked around a bit more and found these:

Ruby version of Markdown

http://maruku.rubyforge.org/

Ruby version of Textile http://whytheluckystiff.net/ruby/redcloth/

Anyone have any experience (positive or negative) with any of these?

Bryan Noll wrote:

5

Another resource:

http://blog.rubygreenblue.com/project/markdown_on_rails

Bryan Noll wrote:

6

I use Textile quite a bit and it works great - it's the RedCloth implementation. I believe that's the one also used in Radiant (though I'm not 100% sure).

Also, there's Textile Editor Helper and acts_as_textiled and they can play together: http://notepad.onghu.com/2007/3/28/using-textile-editor-plugin-and-acts_as_textiled

Cheers, Mohit. 9/15/2007 | 2:24 AM.

Bryan Noll wrote:

7

Yeah, I just did this, I like it.

8

I prefer Markdown since the markup doesn’t interfere much with the readability as text.

Others use Textile to get more control over the styling.

However Maruku is a fairly new implementation of Markdown for Ruby and it also implements Markdown+extra and Markdown+meta which gives you the benefits of markdown syntax with the ability to specify additional styling and attributes where necessary. To me, this is the best of both worlds (readability + plus additional style where needed). So I’d suggest taking a look at Maruku.

http://maruku.rubyforge.org/

Jeff

9

Just got done following this...

http://notepad.onghu.com/2007/3/28/using-textile-editor-plugin-and-acts_as_textiled

... and it does exactly what I needed.

Now I'm on to this to ajaxify it...

http://blog.rayvinly.com/articles/2007/07/10/using-textile-editor-helper-teh-in-an-ajax-environment

Jeff Barczewski wrote:

10

I prefer Markdown since the markup doesn't interfere much with the readability as text.

Is it possible with Markdown to create something like: <h2 id='team'>Our Team</h2>

I couldn't find any info about that. I use rdiscount to parse the plain text to html.

11

I've put up a little survey to see what people prefer. Check it out and let us know your thoughts: http://luciddesign.co.nz/2009/2/9/textile-vs-markdown-vs-tinymce-etc