Symphony.

I've created a new experimental extension called Markdown Live and I would love to get people's feedback about the approach. You can't download it yet, but I've created a short video to demonstrate it.

I actually thought about something like this myself and created an experimental extension based on CodeMirror. I wanted to create an editor similar to iA Writer. You could write Markdown, and instead of just highlighting syntax in different colors, I modified the styles to look more like WYM.

But it always felt too much like a code editor, not like a text editor, so this wasn't exactly what I had in mind for making editing easier for clients.

I'm sticking with my idea to use Redactor and simply convert its output back to Markdown for now, but I'm very interested in your approach and would like to see this evolve.

Just make sure the content is saved in a way that allows for switching editors without losing content and (Markdown-)formatting.

Edit:

After watching your video the second time, I thought of some similarities to Rowan's Content Field. It doesn't render anything in place, but you can also add multiple content sections with different field types (textareas with formatters, input fields, images, ...). Maybe worth a look.

Just make sure the content is saved in a way that allows for switching editors without losing content and (Markdown-)formatting.

Indeed, it's actually a modified textarea field that splits and joins the text areas.

After watching your video the second time, I thought of some similarities to Rowan's Content Field. It doesn't render anything in place, but you can also add multiple content sections with different field types (textareas with formatters, input fields, images, ...). Maybe worth a look.

I was thinking the same thing after I made it. His field is more flexible with different content types. Mine is much simpler which I tend to think of as a con.

I like the idea of his because you could add images that have attributes associated with them (i.e. float left, display attribution etc.) because a separate imagetype could be created. I think it would be rather easy to implement what I've done here to text areas in his extension.

Perhaps this will inspire a development to complete Content Field. I think my next step is to fork his extension and see what I can build upon it.

I’ve been lurking in these discussions with interest. I think this is a situation where all of these approaches—Markdown Live, Jens’ Visual Markdown Editor, Content Field, etc.—would probably have a place depending on how they evolve and a project’s specific needs. For example, it seems like Jens’ editor will be useful for people who don’t really want to write actual Markdown but still want to use it as their text formatter of choice. Markdown Live, on the other hand, is a nice midpoint between raw Markdown formatting without any preview and an actual editor. I like the inline approach to editing; it reminds me of Flickr’s approach to editing titles and descriptions.

I don’t know if I have anything more productive to contribute … just wanted to let you know that your experiments are definitely interesting and not at all in vain. :)

Love the concept!

What would the XML output look like? You mentioned in the video that each text block is an individual textarea, which makes me think that there would then be multiple textareas to output on the frontend.

What would the XML output look like? You mentioned in the video that each text block is an individual textarea, which makes me think that there would then be multiple textareas to output on the frontend.

XML output and storage in the database is exactly the same as the textarea field. On rendering the publish page, I simply split the data by new lines into individual textareas and on save I combine the textareas separated by a new line.

I don’t know if I have anything more productive to contribute … just wanted to let you know that your experiments are definitely interesting and not at all in vain. :)

Thanks!

"Markdown Live" is really a great idea. The closest example maybe is the Storify editor, user could build article structure and content, and drop right panel's collections to the content.

Look forward to it, there is great potential to expand it, not just for backend input content.