Based on John Gruber’s Markdown (Perl), PHP Markdown can be used a Wordpress plugin by copying over the markdown.php file from the zip file to the wp-content/plugins directory. There is an official demo called Dingus here. The screenshot above shows my example of using PHP Markdown syntax through Dingus.

The function Markdown($text) inside markdown.php is passed a text string and returns the marked down version, so incorporating this into another program where you want to markdownify the text is pretty straightforward, although the file is a bit on the bulky side at 55k. Would be more convenient if a version without Wordpress and bBlog code inside it were provided in the zip package. The most recent version as of this writing was September 5, 2005.