I use drupal as the content management engine for some of my community websites that I maintain. I think drupal is one the best CMS engines out there. The recent versions using xtemplate theme look very pleasing to the eyes.

Unfortunately to add new content you have to type in HTML, and most of the HTML editors produce non-compliant HTML. I was looking for a way to type in simple formatted text which will be picked by some drupal module and entered as compliant HTML into the database ready to serve! I came across something called markdown which is exactly what I need. There is additional software called html2text which takes html and converts to markdown format. It should be possible (and dare I say easy) to integrate these two little beasts into drupal. I do definitely want to work on this in my spare time.

Few links:
How to create modules

Macrotags comes very close to description of my job, maybe should try to reuse its code base

drupal textile plugin

Markdown PHP

Update: 2004/05/24

I have started the work on this, infact the plugin is there and works for small entries, but something doesn't work if the entry is too large and the PHP markdown code throws some warnings for each translation... Hopefully, I will get time to correct both thse things

and before I forget here is the code:

http://phpjukebox.sourceforge.net/drupal-markdown/

Incidently there are others who would like to see this happen 🙂