The Markdown editor for BUEditor now has a stable 1.0 release for Drupal 7. I was recently made co-maintainer and are now preparing a 1.1 release. Please help by testing 7.x-1.x-dev. My goal with Markdown editor, besides making it even better, is to make it 10 to 100 times more popular.

If you want to see Markdown editor 7.x-1.x-dev in action I have posted an screencast Introduction to Markdown editor for BUEditor on Vimeo.

I install the Markdown editor by default on all new Drupal sites I build. After some convincing about trying it out most customers are happy using it. When it comes down to it very little markup is needed in content on a well built web site.

Reasons for using Markdown and Markdown editor:

• Always creates valid HTML output.
• Avoid hardcoding HTML markup in content.
• Markdown can easily be converted to multiple formats included some future HTML 10 standard.
• Markdown is easy, even good, to read in raw format.
• The Markdown editor is lightweight and fast loading.
• The Markdown editor doesn’t hijack the textareas, only add some buttons to them.

The Markdown editor is a plugin for BUEditor so you will need that module as well. BUEditor is used on Drupal.org for simple HTML markup in issues and other places.

For nice previews the Ajax markup module is highly recommended. If you install in before activating the Markdown editor you will automatically get a preconfigured preview button in your Markdown editor. To render the Markdown markup in to HTML you need an text format with the Markdown filter.

If you have not used Markdown before checkout John Grubers original Markdown Syntax and the PHP Markdown Extra extensions.