Setting Up Markdown and SmartyPants in WordPress

One of the reasons I was previously hosting this site on Scriptogr.am was due to the native Markdown support. While WordPress.com offers native Markdown support, it’s not a feature of the WordPress.org project.

Once again, I followed Dr. Drang’s lead:

I figured I had to have the Markdown plugin installed before importing, so I went to Michel Fortin’s site and got both PHP-Markdown-Extra and PHP-SmartyPants. After unzipping the downloaded files, I copied them into the wp-content/plugins directory of my blog and activated them from the WordPress plugins administration page. Then I did the import, which seemed to go quickly and flawlessly; there were no error messages.

In the years since Dr. Drang’s original post, PHP-Markdown-Extra is no longer actively developed as a WordPress plugin. Version 1.2.8, from November 29, 2013, is the last ‘Classic’ release with WordPress plugin support. This is what I’m running for now, but I may try to figure out how to run the latest ‘Library’ version when I have some time.

To do the installation, I downloaded and unzipped the classic release. I used scp to copy the plugin over to the server, and then copied it from my home directory into /var/www/jeffvautin.com/wp-content/plugins. With that, the Markdown-formatted content I imported from Scriptogr.am is rendering properly.

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