Allow the body of news items and events to be written in markdown

[itsWill]

It would be cool if for news items and events we could write the body in markdown to give our posts some ⭐ 💎 ⭐ 💎 ⭐ 💎 ⭐. Thinking we could implement this using something like redcarpet

[cawel]

Good idea! I believe @nicholasjhenry told me that was indeed in the pipeline. Pending the core team's approval (e.g. by tagging the issue as a 'feature'), I'd be happy to start on that one.

[itsWill]

I've implemented something like this before, so let me know if you need some pointers on how to tackle this one.

[benichu]

👍

@cawel do you want to take care of it? Also, remember that the markdown storage/display behaviour should be shared by a lot of our models (anywhere we have a description or body fields I believe, source: #47 (comment))

[cawel]

@benichu Sure thing 👍 I will start on that tomorrow Tuesday.

[benichu]

Cool stuff. I invited you to the contributor's team, so you don't have to fork the repository but can directly create branches off the repository. Tell me if you need any help.

[nicholasjhenry]

One additional feature on Events and NewsItems would be to include a filter attribute to specify if it's in markdown or html. This would help with rendering legacy content imported from Wordpress.

[cawel]

@itsWill Thanks for the offer. I've been writing my own notes – on various topics – using the awesome markdown syntax for many years now. I should be good! But I'll be looking forward to hear what you have to say in a possible code review ;)

@benichu Thanks for making me a contributor 🙇

@nicholasjhenry Happy if I make your filter attribute an enum with 2 possibles options (markdown and html)? I would speculate that this attribute will be useful initially when rendering the legacy content in its original html. But once all that legacy content will be converted to markdown (some months from now), the idea is to get rid of that attribute and only support markdown for all user-defined content.

Taking a look at the object model diagram, my understanding is that "markdown support" is required for the following models:

• Event
• Job
• NewsItem
• Organization
• Page
• Talk

So just to double check, Event and NewsItem are the only models which should have that special filter attribute?

[nicholasjhenry]

So just to double check, Event and NewsItem are the only models which should have that special filter attribute?

Correct. Thank you.

[benichu]

@nicholasjhenry Did you have a chance to get a copy of the current wordpress site db dump?
I am curious to know if the content could be converted to markdown when we import instead of implementing a legacy feature that could be (easily, maybe) avoided.
Or, is it a bit too optimistic? Let's have a look at that data before doing any work on the filter.

cc @sophiedeziel

[nicholasjhenry]

@benichu Yes, I do have a copy of the dump. Never considered converting the HTML to markdown, but if that's doable sounds like a plan. I'll share the dump with you via slack.

[benichu]

@cawel I am going to look into the wordpress db dump (asap)...
In the meantime just focus that feature on displaying raw markdown content, no filter unless we have a hard time converting the old content to markdown.

[cawel]

@benichu Understood. New PR created for markdown support phase 1: #89.

[nicholasjhenry]

Actually, another thought -- doesn't the markdown renderer ignore HTML anyway and passes it through?

[cawel]

@nicholasjhenry You are right. Per the Markdown syntax spec, HTML code can be inlined. I tested it to confirm that the redcarpet gem would indeed respect the spec, and it does. 👌

[nicholasjhenry]

• I know that this is a work in progress - just a heads up it would be nice to render markdown fields in the admin. Example: