I would like to announce the first release of a jQuery plugin which converts Wiki text to HTML.

• Download it here
• Try it here (and see how fast it is!)
• Find out more

Why a Wiki Text Plugin?

As you can see by my recent articles about Google Calendar (and there’s more to come) I have written some code to retrieve Calendar Events from a Google Calendar and present them in a web page on the Thistle Society website.

One of the problems I found is that the calendar event description can only be entered as plain text. Now although the calendar is private and I could just put HTML mark-up in there as text, when I eventually make it public it would be unreadable for other non-technical people.

Having used several Wikis before – especially Trac Wiki – I thought that this would be an effective way to provide easy, readable text descriptions of events within Google Calendar, yet render it as marked up HTML.

Wiki Text is:

• easy to read – so ideal for text which non-technical people will read (i.e. event descriptions in Google Calendar)
• easy to learn – a really simple syntax which is quite forgiving of mistakes
• safe to use – the simple text mark-up and escaping of any HTML elements means that there are no nasty surprises when the output is rendered.

So, over the last few weeks I have been writing my first jQuery plugin and it’s finally ready for a wider audience.

What Syntax is Supported?

This initial release supports a good subset of common Wiki formatting options including: –

• Headings.
• Paragraphs, block quotes and pre-formatted text.
• Bulleted and numbered lists.
• Bold, italic, underline, monospace, strikethrough, superscript and subscript character formatting.
• FTP, HTTP(S) and email links.

Visit the Wiki Text home page to try it out, learn more about the Wiki syntax it supports and see how to use the plugin in your own web pages.

The plugin can be downloaded from the Download page.