I've tried to retrieve the wmd-editor source tarball lately, but the site seems offline.

From what I've read on the Internet, wmd-editor is not (yet?) free software by itself, and its author has gone MIA. But it looks like somebody recently took the step to rewrite a wmd-clone under a saner license, see pagedown.

Given all the above, what about upgrading this plugin to use pagedown instead of wmd? It seem a clear win to me...

AFAICS, pagedown is a modified version of WMD. Let's look at its license file: --Joey

A javascript port of Markdown, as used on Stack Overflow
and the rest of Stack Exchange network.

Largely based on showdown.js by John Fraser (Attacklab).

Original Markdown Copyright (c) 2004-2005 John Gruber
  


Original Showdown code copyright (c) 2007 John Fraser

Modifications and bugfixes (c) 2009 Dana Robinson
Modifications and bugfixes (c) 2009-2011 Stack Exchange Inc.

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a
copy [...]

Ok, so it says it's based on showdown. John Fraser wrote showdown and also WMD, which IIRC was built on top of showdown. (Showdown converts the markdown to html, and WMD adds the editor UI.)

I can nowhere find a actual statement of the copyright of showdown or WMD. http://code.google.com/p/wmd/ has a "MIT License" notice on it, but this is clearly just the license chosen when signing up at google code for the repo that would be used for a rewrite of the code, and the only thing said about the previous 1.0 release of WMD is "use it freely", which is not specific enough to be a grant of license, and is moreover not a free software license, as it does not cover distribution or modification.

Which was all covered in the thread here, when StackOverflow decided to start working on pagedown. http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2008/12/reverse-engineering-the-wmd-editor/ This thread does not give any indication that they ever managed to get a license grant for WMD/showdown. It frankly, does not inspire confidence that the people working on this care about the license.

It would probably be pretty easy to adapt the ikiwiki wmd plugin to use pagedown. But without a clear and credible license, why?

(Note that I have a wmd-new branch in my ikiwiki git repo that uses https://github.com/derobins/wmd, which was an earlier version of pagedown (probably, not entirely clear).)

An alternate alternative is markitup: http://markitup.jaysalvat.com/ It has a clear history and a credible license (MIT or GPL dual license). It's also easily extensible to other formats so could handle rst etc. It does not, however, have a markdown to html converter -- for previewing it has to talk to the server with AJAX. --Joey

I've got pagedown working on my personal site (simon.kisikew.org) but I'm not sure how I can inject the relevant <div>'s in the right place. They need to go above the editing <textarea> . (Too bad about the licensing, it's rather nice.) I had to do one minor change to it to have it inject itself into the page properly, and that was to make this change in Markdown.Editor.js:

this.input = doc.getElementById("editcontent" + postfix);

on line 247. --simonraven

Well, I re-figured out that I needed a TMPL_VAR FOO in the template(s). --simonraven