Making WordPress.org

Opened 9 years ago

Closed 11 months ago

#696 closed enhancement (wontfix)

Add markdown support to support forum editor

Reported by: ahockley's profile ahockley Owned by:
Milestone: Priority: normal
Component: Support Forums Keywords:
Cc:

Description

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).

Change History (15)

#1 follow-up: @DrewAPicture
9 years ago

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.

#2 in reply to: ↑ 1 @ahockley
9 years ago

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.

#3 follow-up: @obenland
6 years ago

@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?

#4 in reply to: ↑ 3 ; follow-up: @dd32
6 years ago

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.

#5 in reply to: ↑ 4 @netweb
6 years ago

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?

#6 @johnjamesjacoby
6 years ago

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.

This ticket was mentioned in Slack in #forums by clorith. View the logs.


6 years ago

#8 @Clorith
6 years ago

  • Resolution set to wontfix
  • Status changed from new to closed

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.

#9 @aatanasov
18 months ago

  • Resolution wontfix deleted
  • Status changed from closed to reopened

I'd like to open this ticket and discuss the possibility of incorporating Markdown into https://wordpress.org/support/forums/.

Markdown has been added to almost every platform we use to communicate, and even non-technical users have started using it.

It would be great if we could use Markdown when writing messages in the WordPress.org support forums (keeping the HTML tags for backward compatibility).

This feature will help people who give support write formatted messages quickly.

Last edited 18 months ago by aatanasov (previous) (diff)

This ticket was mentioned in Slack in #forums by aatanasov610. View the logs.


18 months ago

#11 @ben.greeley
14 months ago

With Gutenberg now being used across the support forums, it seems the right approach for this ticket would be to enable markdown via the 'Blocks Everywhere' plugin.

I opened a https://wordpress.org/support/topic/markdown-support-4/ in their support forum to see how this might be achieved.

If we don't want to support markdown at all (which was a previous suggestion in this thread), let's close this one again. In my humble opinion, Gutenberg's markdown implementation is pretty solid, but if users might be confused with content automatically being converted by the editor, it may not be worth it.

#12 @ben.greeley
14 months ago

Following up here, it looks like core Gutenberg has limited Gutenberg support such as headings but not for links or bold/italic/etc. If we were to achieve this it would need to be done through a plugin which would implement full markdown support into the editor.

This ticket was mentioned in Slack in #forums by vladytimy. View the logs.


13 months ago

#14 @vladytimy
13 months ago

  • Keywords close added

We've had a bug scrub today and closure was proposed for this ticket, although the markdown support should still be taken in consideration within the new block system that we have now in place. We think the work on this should continue in either Gutenberg or Blocks Everywhere plugin. Feel free to add your opinion on this if you feel otherwise.

#15 @Clorith
11 months ago

  • Keywords close removed
  • Resolution set to wontfix
  • Status changed from reopened to closed

As there's been no more movement for a few months after the proposal to close it out, I'm going to mark this as wontfix at this time.

The current notion that the editor has some simplified support for markdown still stands, and it makes sense that what the editor supports, the forums support. The editor would be the most familiar aspect to a user seeking support, and they would likely be able to recognize it form their own site, and not be surprised by any formatting it supports and handles.

Note: See TracTickets for help on using tickets.