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 MarkdownBlock for use in streamfields.
• A MarkdownField for use in page models.
• A 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).

Using it

Use it as a StreamField block:

from wagtailmarkdown import MarkdownBlock

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

Or use as a page field:

from wagtailmarkdown import MarkdownField, MarkdownPanel

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

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

And render the content in a template:

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

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

TODO

• Using the markdown filter in the template should not be necessary.