Doodad

By Ryan Gray (u2mr2os2@me.com)

16 July 2012

A dynamic Markdown serving script.

You can have a whole site served on-the-fly with Markdown, including the index files.

Requirements

• Apache web server

• PHP 5.3 or later

• A PHP Markdown converter

  • PHP Markdown
  • PHP Markdown Extra
  • PHP Markdown Extra Math
  • Other PHP converter with a function called markdown() that accepts the Markdown text string or change the call yourself.

Optional

If you use PHP Markdown Extra Math, you can enable MathJax support to render embedded math using LaTeX syntax.

Installation

1. Put the folder containing the files in a directory under your Apache webroot folder.

2. Get one of the PHP Markdown converters above, and put it under your webroot somewhere.

3. Edit the config.php file to set the require statement to point to the PHP Markdown script.

4. Browse to the doodad/test folder, and you should get the test page.

Setup

• Edit the config.php file:

  • Set $homeWeb to the URL path from root to the folder you want to serve with this script.

    You should copy and modify the .htaccess file in the test folder to this location. You can alternatively define this folder to be handled by this script in your Apache httpd.conf file by defining a <Location> for it and start with the directives in the sample .htaccess file in the test folder, adjusting them as needed.

    The directives for the doodad folder being just under the web root:

      DirectoryIndex index.php index.html index.md index.text 
      # Path for PHP script needs to be from web root
      Action markdown /doodad/doodad.php
      AddHandler markdown .text .md
    

  • You can change the CSS location

    The main CSS adds a lot of junk from my (unreleased) larger version of this project, and it also includes my Markdown CSS called Buttondown, which is optimized for Pandoc HTML output, but should still work well for basic output by other converters.

    You'll notice in the main.css file, it defines rules that look for words in image title attributes. You can add these to an image title to get some styling effects such as:

      ![](../css/linkTypeIcons/img/doc.png "box border shadow rounded")
    

    Gives:

    

    It does co-opt the title attribute some, but you could just add these words at the end.

    It also includes my linkTypeIcons CSS rules that will automatically append an icon based on the file extension of a file you have linked to. You can add some of your own or just comment out the include in main.css.

    There is also a iOS.css that is included, but I'm still working on it. My CSS-fu is still weak.

  • You can enable the math option if you use PHP Markdown Extra Math as the PHP Markdown processor.

  See config.php for more details in the comments.

• Edit the template.php file to your liking.

  This is the template for the HTML page. It has a little PHP in it for the dynamic parts, but is mostly the static HTML for the generated HTML page.

• For use in user folders:

  If you put this in a folder under a user's web folder (to access with say http://localhost/~joe/doodad/test, you will need to have configured Apache to be able to browse there.

  For Mac OS X, at least, you will need to create a file in /etc/apache2/users named username.conf, where username is the short username (e.g., "joe" in the example URL above). In that file, you should have at least:

    <Directory "/Users/joe/Sites/">
        AllowOverride All
        Order allow,deny
        Allow from all
    </Directory>
  

  replacing "joe" with the appropriate username. As I understand it, this file should have root:wheel ownership, so do:

    sudo chown root:wheel joe.conf
  

  As a note, it seems that upgrading from Mac OS X 10.7 to 10.8 removed these user files I had previously set up, which made my user sites not work. As usual, it also replaced my modified httpd.conf file and thus disabled PHP, but at least that is normal to have to uncomment when upgrading.

URL Query Options

format=

• format=text

  Display the source Markdown text.

    `http://mydomain.com/mdstuff/page1.md?format=text`
  

• format=nav

  Display a navigation page relative to the current location. It has two options for recursing down directories and including files.

  • recurse=yes, recurse=no

  • files=yes, files=no

  A nav link is built into the breadcrumb tail's "...". You can change the options it uses or include nav links with different options in your page or in your banner.

  Example: http://mydomain.com/mdstuff/page1.md?format=nav&recurse=yes&files=no

A version of Downdraft that uses Pandoc has other format options.

Using

Just edit and create files in the folder being served, and they will be available right away. You can use relative links to link pages easily:

[Go up](..)

[Sibling page](sibling.md)

[Relative page](subfolder/foo.md)

Since the .htaccess file defines index.md and index.text as additional defaults for DirectoryIndex, you can use a Markdown file with one of these names (or adjust the .htaccess file to the extensions you prefer) as a directory index, so that you can make the whole site with just Markdown files.

This is useful if you make a folder for each page and make the Markdown file as index.md, then you can put any local images you need in the folder and just link to them relative with no path:

![](foo.png)

The page will then have a URL that doesn't (need to) give the file name with the markdown extension. This way, you can switch favorite extensions later, or even later switch to having the .md files statically converted to index.html files along side, and those would be served instead (since index.html comes before index.md in the DirectoryIndex definition. The URLs that people have linked to would not need to change.