RapidWeaver Markup Plugin

I’m big fan of lightweight markup languages, popular with server-side blogging software such as Movable Type and Wordpress: they’re perfect for writing Web pages, where you want mostly freeform text, and when formatted text controls sometimes get in your way more than they help. Since RapidWeaver uses a rich-text control for styling text that I just couldn’t get used to, I wrote a little plugin named Markup so you can write in a markup language instead. It simply adds a Markup Language menu item below RapidWeaver’s HTML menu item, where you can pick from a small but excellent set of markup languages, such as:

For the UNIX wizards, you can also have bash markup: i.e. markup that’s filtered through the UNIX /bin/bash shell that’s installed on every Mac OS X computer. It can also add “smart” punctuation to your Web pages via SmartyPants, if you’re one of those folks (like me) who appreciates seeing proper em-dashes, ellipses and open quotes.

There’s a ton of improvements that I still have to make to it, but hey, something is better than nothing!

Download

Markup 0.16 may also even work with RapidWeaver 3.2 and Mac OS X 10.3.9, although that's not officially supported.

If you do find any bugs, just email me (details at AndrePang): I’ll add it to my to-do list. Ditto for feature suggestions, for which I’m sure you have many ideas!

Support

We have two mailing lists for the Markup plugin:

Feel free to post any questions you have about the Markup plugin to those lists.

Tips and Tricks

  • See the text at the bottom of my home page that tells you when this site was last updated? That was automatically generated via the bash filter. Simply type in Last updated on date +'%A, %B %Y, %e' into any RapidWeaver styled text area, select the “date +'%A, %B %Y, %e'” bit, and choose the bash markup language from the Format -> Markup Language menu.

Developers

Feel free to check out the Subversion repository, or browse the source code in Trac.

Other Markup Plugins

It seems that I’m not alone in wanting to add markup support for RapidWeaver. At least two other enterprising developers have their own markup-esque plugins available for RapidWeaver, which you may prefer:

  • plessl’s Markdown plugin (with accompanying source code--yeah for open source!). Note that plessl’s plugin takes a different approach to mine: whereas plessl’s Markdown plugin offers a new RapidWeaver page style, my Markup plugin enables you to use markup text in any RapidWeaver styled text area, such as the sidebar for each page.
  • Loghound’s PlusKit, which offers a slightly different approach to markup text (via explicit <markdown> and </markdown> tags), and also does a lot more besides that (such as being to merge other page styles into the current page, ala Blocks 2).