Markdown in WordPress

I love Markdown because it looks clean and it’s easy to use. So I am curious about using the markup language in my WordPress installation. My blog is self hosted and based on a download from wordpress.org.

Google is your friend and so I am searching for ‘markdown in wordpress’. The first hit sound promissing: ‘Markdown — Support — WordPress.com‘. The instructions tell me to just enable markdown support in the settings. So it’s already build in? Im going to settings but cannot find the switch in my installation. Looks like the service from WordPress.com is not the download you get from WordPress.org.

The next hit from Google tells me to install the WP-Markdown plugin. That plugin has not been updated for 4 years so I don’t want to install it in order to prevent some security issues.

One other hit suggests to install Jetpack. That plugin comes from WordPress.com and is not free so this also no choice for me.

There are some other plugins as well (e.g. ‘WP Editor.MD’) but after testing a couple of them I did not find one that I really like.

After all the text mode of the WordPress editor is what I use. It is also pretty clean and allows entering of HTML tags so it’s pretty similar to Markdown.