I was building a new site for a client, and wanted them to be able to add text into the bottom half of the template, which would contain paragraphs, lists and possibly links. The only way this could be done in WordPress is with the standard Text widget, but that would require cumbersome HTML editing.

I’m a big fan of Markdown, a really simple text markup system which is human-readable, and so human-editable. It’s almost as flexible as HTML, offering a number of extensions, but reads in a very sane and sensible way. (Bulleted lists are denoted by an asterisk, numbered ones by using the appropriate digit and a full stop.)

I was surprised that no plugin already existed for this purpose, so I knocked together markdown-widget, implementing Michel Fortin’s brilliant Markdown Extra script.

Requirements

This plugin requires WordPress 2.8 or later, as it uses the new Widget API.

How to use

1. Just download the Zip file, extract it and and upload it to your /wp-content/plugins directory or install it via the Plugins menu in your WordPress dashboard.
2. Activate the plugin.
3. Select Widgets from the Appearance menu, then simply drag and drop a Markdown Text widget onto a sidebar
4. Enter a title for the widget
5. Enter the main body of your text below the title, using the Markdown syntax