Markdown in Rophako

I've made an update to my Rophako CMS that powers Kirsle.net: it now supports Markdown!

Blog posts can be either written in Markdown, or direct HTML (the old way). In Markdown mode, HTML is currently escaped from the post. I may change this and make it only escape HTML in comments if I find it to be a PITA in the future. ;) Oh, and emoticons still work (they're rendered after Markdown is done).

Markdown works in comments, too, but with some limitations, like I don't allow embedding images. Also, you can write entire pages on your site in Markdown. Just create a page named with a .md file extension that contains Markdown code and it "just works" (there's a built-in markdown.inc.html file in the default site that wraps your rendered document in your web design's layout).

Best of all, I'm using a handful of extensions to the Python Markdown module to enable a lot of Github style Markdown features, such as code highlighting. Here's a Python example:

def render_markdown(body, html_escape=True):
    """Render a block of Markdown text.

    This will default to escaping literal HTML characters. Set
    `html_escape=False` to trust HTML."""

    args = dict(
        lazy_ol=False, # If a numbered list starts at e.g. 4, show the <ol> there
        extensions=[
            "fenced_code",  # GitHub style code blocks
            "tables",       # http://michelf.ca/projects/php-markdown/extra/#table
            "smart_strong", # Handles double__underscore better.
            "codehilite",   # Code highlighting with Pygment!
            "nl2br",        # Line breaks inside a paragraph become <br>
            "sane_lists",   # Make lists less surprising
        ],
        extension_configs={
            "codehilite": {
                "linenums": False,
            }
        }
    )
    if html_escape:
        args["safe_mode"] = "escape"

    return markdown.markdown(body, **args)

I'll be revisiting all my old blog posts that have code pasted in them and reformatting them in Markdown for easier maintenance. My old way of pasting code in a blog post was to open the code in vim, and then run commands like,

:let html_use_css=1
:TOhtml

... which would output an HTML file that syntax highlights the code, and then I'd cut and paste all that junk into my blog. Blech. Markdown will be much cleaner. :D