Installing Textpattern 4.0.4 with Markdown

Sunday, January 14, 2007

Textpattern is a brilliant blogging tool, one which seems completely dedicated to the task of putting words on a page. It has a great plugin structure, and in in practically every respect the blogging tool I’d recommend above all others.

The one place where it fails remarkably to exceed my expectations is it’s single-minded dedication to Dean Allen’s Textile format. I don’t particularly like Textile, you see. I simply get too hung up on the formatting. Markdown (in combination with SmartyPants), on the other hand, is a lightweight markup language I can really get behind. It feels like it just gets out of my way, and lets me write without thinking about the rendering framework.

Happily, Michel Fortin’s PHP port of the language has the ingenious ability to pretend to be Textile, so it can serve as a drop-in replacement in programs like Textpattern. So if you’d like to get a clean copy of Textpattern 4.0.4 running Markdown, just copy and paste the following commands. You’ll end up with a clean install in ~/src/, ready for you to start playing with.

mkdir ~/src
cd ~/src
#
#   GET PHP MARKDOWN
#
curl -O http://www.michelf.com/docs/projets/php-markdown-extra-1.1.1.zip
unzip php-markdown-extra-1.1.1.zip 'PHP Markdown Extra 1.1.1/markdown.php'
rm php-markdown-extra-1.1.1.zip
mv 'PHP Markdown Extra 1.1.1/markdown.php' ./classTextile.php
rm -rf 'PHP Markdown Extra 1.1.1'
#
#   GET SMARTYPANTS
#
curl -O http://www.michelf.com/docs/projets/php-smartypants-typographer-1.0.zip
unzip php-smartypants-typographer-1.0.zip 'PHP SmartyPants Typographer 1.0/smartypants.php'
rm php-smartypants-typographer-1.0.zip
mv 'PHP SmartyPants Typographer 1.0/smartypants.php' ./smartypants.php
rm -rf 'PHP SmartyPants Typographer 1.0'
#
#   GET TEXTPATTERN FROM SVN
#
svn export --force http://svn.textpattern.com/releases/4.0.4/source/ .
#
#   INSTALL MARKDOWN AND SMARTYPANTS
#
mv classTextile.php ./textpattern/lib/classTextile.php
mv smartypants.php ./textpattern/lib/smartypants.php
#
#   FIX SMALL BUG IN PHP MARKDOWN EXTRA'S TEXTILE EMULATION
#
NICE="\$new = 'function TextileRestricted(\$text, \$lite, \$encode) { return \$this->TextileThis(\$text, \$lite, \$encode); }';if (/function blockLite/) { \$_ = \$_.\"\\t\\t\".\$new.\"\\n\"; }";
perl -pi.bak -e "$NICE" classTextile.php;
#
#    SUCCESS!
#

That’s it! Enjoy!

UPDATE: Carlo noticed that comments broke on my site after updating to Textpattern 4.0.4. As it turns out, a new feature was added to Textile at some point between the Textpattern 4.0.3 and 4.0.3 releases, which hasn’t yet made it’s way into PHP Markdown Extra’s Textile emulation mode. I’ve added a quick fix for it in the code here, and submitted a patch to Michel Fortin who maintains PHP Markdown.

In short, Textile now supports a “Restricted” mode when submitting comments, which does some things differently than the normal Textile processing. Links are automatically “nofollow”d, images are restricted, and block tags are limited to quotes and paragraphs. It might be worth implementing something like that in Markdown, but for the moment, my “fix” simply calls the normal Markdown routine when TextileRestricted is called. That’s not perfect, but it’s better than dying entirely with a fatal error.

— Mike West