Doorkeeper
News

Announcing Markdown Support

Friday, September 07, 2012

With Doorkeeper, we’re always happy to receive feedback from our users. One thing we’ve heard many times from you is that you wanted an easier way to style your event descriptions and messages. So we decided to switch from the old and clunky TinyMCE to a simple text field, using markdown.

Markdown is a simple set of text formatting rules that turns your text into HTML. If you’re unsure what that means, don’t worry. You can simply type in your text, and it’ll come out alright.

If you want to get more adventurous and further style your text, you can find a simple guide on styling next to each field which allows you to enter markdown.

Links

http://doorkeeper.jp - automatic
[Doorkeeper](http://doorkeeper.jp)

Images

![Doorkeeper Logo](/logo.png)
Format: ![Alt Text](url)

Text styles

*This text will be italic*
**This text will be bold**

Unordered Lists

* Item 1
* Item 2
  * Item 2a

Ordered Lists

1. Item 1
2. Item 2
  * Item 2a

For the markdown experts out there, read on for more gory details:

Differences from traditional markdown

Doorkeeper uses a version that is slightly different than standard markdown (but very similar to one of our favourite web services).

For our software developers reading this, here’s how we create our markdown renderer:

html = Redcarpet::Render::HTML.new(:hard_wrap => true)
Redcarpet::Markdown.new(html, :autolink => true, :lax_html_blocks => true)

If that doesn’t make sense to you, read on as we explain the differences.

Handling of line breaks

In traditional markdown, line breaks are not considered significant, meaning if you have the following source markdown

This is a single line
This is another line

it will become

This is a single line This is another line

as this is often not what you intend, with Doorkeeper style markdown, it will become

This is a single line
This is another line

Autolinking of URLs

Doorkeeper style markdown will automatically convert any URLs into links.

Lax HTML Blocks

Under traditional markdown, blocks of HTML need to be surrounded by newlines, but with Doorkeeper style markdown, this isn’t necessary.