This is an editor plugin for popular open source Q&A platform, Question2Answer. It uses Markdown to format posts, which is a simple text-friendly markup language using for example **bold** for bold text or > for quoting sources.

The plugin uses modified versions of the PageDown scripts (released by Stack Overflow) for the editor and live preview respectively.

1. Download and extract the markdown-editor folder to the qa-plugins folder in your Q2A installation.
2. If your site is a different language from English, copy qa-md-lang-default.php to the required language code (e.g. qa-tt-lang-de.php for German) and edit the phrases for your language.
3. Log in to your Q2A site as a Super Administrator and head to Admin > Posting.
4. Set the default editor for questions and answers to 'Markdown Editor'. The editor does also work for comments, but keeping to plain text is recommended.

In Admin > Plugins, you can set three options:

• "Don't add CSS inline" - this will not output the CSS onto the page, to allow putting it in a stylesheet instead which is more efficient. Copy the CSS from pagedown/wmd.css to the bottom of your theme's current stylesheet.
• "Plaintext comments" - Sets a post as plaintext when converting answers to comments.
• "Use syntax highlighting" - Integrates highlight.js for code blocks (including while writing posts). All common programming languages are supported, but you can add more using the customized download here. Save the file and overwrite pagedown/highlight.min.js. If you ticked the box for CSS above, copy the CSS from pagedown/highlightjs.css to the bottom of your theme's current stylesheet.

Converting old posts: If you have been running your Q2A site for a little while, you may wish to convert old content to Markdown. This does not work reliably for HTML content (created via the WYSIWYG editor); it is pretty safe for plain text content, but check your posts afterwards as some formatting may go awry. You can convert text posts automatically using this SQL query:

UPDATE qa_posts SET format='markdown' WHERE format='' AND type IN ('Q', 'A', 'Q_HIDDEN', 'A_HIDDEN')

(Make sure to change qa_ above to your installation's table prefix if it is different.)

Most of my code is released under the open source GPLv3 license, and provided with a 'Pay What You Like' approach. Feel free to download and modify the plugins/themes to suit your needs, and I hope you value them enough to make a small donation of a few dollars or more.