Whilst doing my usual rounds on the web this morning, I stumbled across a real gem. This particular gem is a simple (yet incredibly powerful) Markup Editor. You may be thinking that this is another WYSIWYG Editor (What You See Is What You Get), but it is a bit different. With a true WYSIWYG Editor it is exactly that - what your seeing is how your content will look. You don't actually see the markup (code) that constructs the html output. In the case of a Markup Editor, when you select one of the easily recognizable buttons for H1, H2, H3, Image, Link, etc - it actually outputs the code. You will recognize this behavior from many Forums, which often use BBCode.

A brief history..

When we were working on HouseFinderUK.com, one of our biggest challenges was to make the site unbreakable by agents and home owners. Any site where you have non technical users interacting in ways that require any type of data entry, having an editor can be really really dangerous. Just imagine the nice 30em Bold Pink Impact text and all your hard work of getting the property listing page to look a master piece! At the time i searched high and low to find a simple configurable editor that would give users only the raw basics (H3, h4, h4, strong, italics, Unordered List, Ordered List, Horizontal Rule, etc) - none of the typical controls that would allow them to cause havoc (such as font size, font family, color, etc). We ended up going with a slimmed down version of TinyMCE, thought its still too heavy for my liking!

What makes Markitup a gem worth mentioning?

First of all it uses Jquery and anyone who knows anything about the various Javascript libraries available will know that Jquery is the creme de la creme of javascript libraries. Its lightweight, robust and extremely powerful. So that already is a big thumbs up.

Second, its lightweight. This is really important because for it to be integrated into an app or site, it needs to be as lightweight as possible.

Thirdly, it can easily be configured to use either Html, Textile, Wiki Syntax, Markdown, BBcode or even your own Markup system. This gives you loads of flexibility and makes it a valuable addition to any application.

If you are planning a project that requires users to input content in a way that isn't just plain text, then be sure to checkout MarkItUp!

Checkout their site for a full feature list, examples, documentation and downloads!