Using Markdown in Fargo

As we continue the march through features introduced by the Trex CMS, let's take a look at how Markdown works.

Basic approach

Check out this post by our mythical tech evangelist, Kim Parker.

Note that it's missing all the usual dressing. There's no menu, none of the usual embellishments that come from using a template.

That's because the type of the post is markdown. When we render that type, we simply pass the text through the markdown processor and display the result.

Macros still work

You can put macros and glossary entries in the text, and they will be evaluated.

Observation

In this mode, you can think of Fargo as an outline-based content management system for Markdown.

Combining templates and Markdown

There's a clever trick that lets you use one of the standard templates or one you create yourself, and still use Markdown in the body of the post. That's done with the method attribute.

In Kim's second Markdown post, she leaves the type as it was as outline, and adds a method attribute with the value markdown.

So the body of the post is in markdown, but it's rendered through the outline template.

Best of both worlds!

Markdown in feeds

When Fargo generates your RSS feed, if an item is of type or method markdown, instead of generating hierarchic markup for the description element of the RSS item, we just run the text through the markdown processor.


Posted: Mon, 22 Jul 2013 20:05:47 GMT