leave old posts untouched

[seanmiddleditch]

Adding WP-MarkDown to an existing blog will cause all old posts to be handled by WP-MarkDown. The plugin should only have an effect on posts that are originally authored by WP-MarkDown or which the author opts in to. Adding <div> tags to the beginning of existing posts does not stop much of the munging done by WP-MarkDown.

[manojhl]

currently wp-markdown acts on all post/entries of a post type selected, I think this is good @seanmiddleditch because with multiple authors using both wp-editor and wp-markdown will result in a mess of content stored. TinyMce used wpautop and texturize functions which wp-markdown don't use, so you have to make a decision weather to use wp-markdown or default wp-editor, but if you choose both you will get pain in the ***.....

[stephenharris]

@seanmiddleditch Activating WP-MarkDown doesn't touch the database - no posts are changed. What you may see is when editing an old post, there are some errors in the HTML -> markdown conversion, but this would only be saved to the database if the post is updated.

Regarding adding an option on enabling markdown on a post-by-post basis, I decided against this to keep the UI-impact minimal (also, for my own use, I always intended of using only markdown for all posts). You may want to take a look at Markdown on Save which (if I recall) does allow per-post markdown.

@manojhl - I've never tested multi-author sites, but it should be that markdown is enabled for all or none...

[seanmiddleditch]

@stephenharris: this does not match the very effect that I saw on my site. Old published posts on the public site were mangled with WP-MarkDown enabled but not when it was disabled. I only noticed because users complained that many of my old posts I had never touched again were practically unreadable. Attempting to go back and fix them was a non-starter given that then the editor would attempt to read the HTML back into Markdown, fail badly at it, and then present me something even worse than the public posts' content. I ran a DB command to insert <div> before all old posts' content which helped a bit but didn't completely disable the bad formatting. The old recourse was to uninstall WP-MarkDown. Perhaps some other plugin caused the formatting plugin to run again.

The end story is still that established blogs simply don't have the option of converting all their old content to MarkDown and a solution for these users would be handy.

[kylecordes]

I just tumbled across this old open issue. This appears to still be a very useful (although not very updated) plug-in. But it's unfortunately impractical to add to an existing long-lived site because of the limitation here, in which once installed any page will be parsed to markdown for editing. Lots of sites have lots of old posts which aren't in the cleanest of HTML condition suitable for translation and editing this way.