FlatPress needs to move towards native Markdown

[Num7]

Hi everyone, I’ve had what follows on my mind for a while now. I did a recent deep-dive in the world of Markdown blogging engines that kept bringing me back to what my dream version of FlatPress would be. Figured I'd put words on it and share it. Who knows.

Consider this:

- Blogger is an outdated platform that’s barely maintained by Google.
- WordPress is a greedy, unsecure platform that everyone and their mom are using.
- Medium.com, Substack… do you even own your content anymore?
- GitHub Pages and Jekyll are awesome, but building and running a blog with them is more complicated than it should be.
- Don’t even mention Tumblr.

Don’t get me wrong, the classic blogging platforms aren’t going away… In fact, they’re not going anywhere… and that’s mostly the issue. They’re stuck in 2010 when hacking together a blog was cool. The result? Most blogs are old and look old…

Welcome to 2025. Most modern cool blogs are now powered by GitHub Pages + Jekyll. Blogs (or sites) that are made out of Markdown (.md) files.

Markdown is a beautiful standard for writing and sharing. Farewell BBCode, manual HTML tags, etc.

In recent years, several small platforms were born with a similar offer: A minimalist Markdown blogging engine. Here are a couple of such platforms: [Lykhari Blog](https://lykhari.com/), [Bear Blog](https://bearblog.dev/), [Write As](https://write.as/), [Mataroa](https://mataroa.blog/), [Pika page](https://pika.page/).

What do these platforms have in common with GitHub Pages and Jekyll? They’re hosted and use Markdown as their native format. (All the laters require a paid sub to unlock most of their interesting features... )

I believe there’s a gap, here. What if I want a simple Markdown blog, but I don’t want to mess with GitHub? What if I want to self-host? Free, simple, solid, self-hosted...?

I feel that FlatPress is missing one single thing to fill this gap: Native Markdown support. With native Markdown support, FlatPress could become THE self-hosted Markdown blogging engine. Everything else is there. It would make so much sense.

I know that there’s a Markdown plugin available. But IMO, the vanilla FlatPress package needs to come with proper, world-class NATIVE markdown support. Native as in first and primary.

Anyway, thank you for reading my TED-Talk on Markdown blogging. I hope this helps give FlatPress some more gas.

[fraenkiman]

Hello Num7,

Markdown does not cover FlatPress-specific special cases.

Examples:

Code: Select all

[gallery=images/Leggero-Themepreview width=180]
[font=arial]Text[/font]
[img=images/image.jpeg width=180 float=left title=FlatPress]

The Parsedown plugin works in parallel with BBcode and covers a large part of the Markdown syntax. However, Markdown will not be able to replace the FlatPress BBcode functionality.

With a little work, you can also add icons/buttons to the Parsedown plugin, which can be placed above the input field.

Best regards,
Frank

[RainerBielefeld]

I feel that FlatPress is missing one single thing to fill this gap: Native Markdown support.

I also prefer Markdown to BCC
May be that it misses some features compared to BCC, but ...

CU

Rainer