Even though Blooki currently provides Textile, Tiki and ConvertBreaks filters, I've been thinking about adding Markdown as several people asked me about it. Markdown is a perl module, so I didn't expect any troubles integrating it with Blooki. There were few challenges though both related to the fact that Markdown is not distributed as a Perl module; instead it's distributed as a Perl script.

First, since it can run as a script and as a plugin for MovableType and Blosxom it checks if either of those is avaiable and if not, it waits for input to be processed. This is easily fixable by changing defined($blosxom::version) (line 184 in Markdown 1.0) to something like (caller(0))[7], which returns true if the script was called using use/require/do.

Second, the old IfModule directive in a config file only processesed "real" modules/packages, and not files. So I extended it to accept files and Perl versions (as Markdown requires Perl 5.6 and later). Now the fragment that loads Markdown looks like the following:

  <IfModule 5.006 Markdown.pl> # Markdown requires Perl 5.006
    AddModule Markdown
  </IfModule>

This goes into Blooki 0.48.

I've been quitely working on this application for some time, but it looks like a good time to make it public. The package seems to be good enough to be useful to other people (one of the things that is missing is documentation). I'm dog-fooding blooki to run this site: it's used to run a development weblog and I also plan on using it to power support forums and a project documentation website.