wagtail-markdown: Markdown fields and blocks for Wagtail

Tired of annoying rich text editors getting in the way of your content input? Wish Wagtail worked more like a wiki? Well, now it can.

wagtail-markdown provides Markdown field support for Wagtail. Specifically, it provides:

• A wagtailmarkdown.blocks.MarkdownBlock for use in streamfields.
• A wagtailmarkdown.fields.MarkdownField for use in page models.
• A wagtailmarkdown.edit_handlers.MarkdownPanel for use in the editor interface.
• A markdown template tag.

The markdown rendered is based on python-markdown, but with several extensions to make it actually useful in Wagtail:

• Tables.
• Code highlighting.
• Inline links to pages (<:My page name|link title>) and documents (<:doc:My fancy document.pdf>), and inline images (<:image:My pretty image.jpeg>).
• Inline Markdown preview using SimpleMDE

These are implemented using the python-markdown extension interface. Currently, adding new extensions isn't possible without modifying the code, but that shouldn't be difficult to implement (patches welcome).

Installation

Alpha release is available on Pypi - https://pypi.org/project/wagtail-markdown/ - installable via pip install wagtail-markdown. It's not a production ready release.

Using it

Add it to INSTALLED_APPS:

INSTALLED_APPS = (
...
    'wagtailmarkdown',
...
)

Use it as a StreamField block:

from wagtailmarkdown.blocks import MarkdownBlock

class MyStreamBlock(StreamBlock):
    markdown = MarkdownBlock(icon="code")

Or use as a page field:

from wagtailmarkdown.edit_handlers import MarkdownPanel
from wagtailmarkdown.fields import MarkdownField

class MyPage(Page):
    body = models.MarkdownField()

    content_panels = [
        FieldPanel("title", classname="full title"),
        MarkdownPanel("body"),
    ]

And render the content in a template:

{% load wagtailmarkdown %}
<article>
{{ self.body|markdown }}
</article>

To enable syntax highlighting please use the Pygments (pip install Pygments) library.

NB: The current version was written in about an hour and is probably completely unsuitable for production use. Testing, comments and feedback are welcome: [email protected] (or open a Github issue).

TODO

• Make a alpha/beta release and submit to PyPI
• Set up CI
• Set up tests