Justin McCandless

I've always found myself bouncing back and forth with how I write articles for this blog. Whether I'm writing straight HTML, using a WYSIWYG editor, or compiling markdown, I'm never quite satisfied however I'm doing it. So I decided to hack together a solution combining the best of all of them. That resulted in the open source project Markdown-HTML-Form, which I'm happily using to type this right now. The idea was to use exising open source projects to create a markdown input that syncs with an editable WYSIWYG preview, and make it a snap to integrate into an HTML form on top of that.

Take a look at the live demo of the full implementation so you know what we're talking about.

There are a few projects out there that get you pretty close to this (check out Hallo's own markdown demo), and a few commercial WYSIWYG editors that do a lot more, but I wanted to create something that was bundled up and incredibly easy to use for this purpose, and that wasn't going to introduce a lot of bloat.

With Markdown HTML Form, all you have to do is add a class to your form elements and include the javascript and it works right away.

Check out the Github project for more info on how to use it and another example. This is something that I wished someone else had written awhile ago, and I'm now using it myself right on this blog, so I hope it helps a few other people out.