Most projects that handle code (like Github) or talk about code (like StackOverflow) allow you to document your code or write questions and responses in a format called MarkDown. Markdown is a lightweight markup language with plain text formatting syntax designed so that it can be converted to HTML and many other formats using a tool by the same name. Markdown is often used to format readme files, for writing messages in online discussion forums, and to create rich text using a plain text editor.

Markdown was first released on March 19, 2004. Over 11 years ago! It was brought into this world by John Gruber from Daring Fireball and Aaron Swartz. Many coders have become accustomed to this format and expect it to be present in the system they are working wit. The atlassian suite (Jira, Confluence etc.) has partial support for MarkDown in BitBucket. I wish they would also allow it in HipChat and allow it's use throughout the full toolchain.

It has been possible to use MarkDown in TYPO3 too. There are a few extensions that enable a MarkDown content element in the backend. But all of these extensions lack a 'live preview' capability. So I created a new extension based on the ParseDown PHP library. This library parses the Markdown line by line resulting in a huge speed increase over other PHP implementations.

After installing the Markdown extension composer require typo3-ter/parsedown, you will have a new content element called 'Markdown'. It has a simple Content TextArea and a Preview area. The preview area updates every two seconds or 10 keystrokes. You can also get the extension from TER: http://typo3.org/extensions/repository/view/parsedown

Enjoy!