Ölbaum’s Delirium: Bö 1.0b3

Bö 1.0b3 is now available, with a proper Read Me and the ability to escape footnote calls so I could add examples to this entry.

Bö 1.0b3

Name

Bö

Description

Bö is a preprocessor for John Gruber’s Markdown, a text-to-HTML filter that translates an easy-to-read / easy-to-write structured text format into HTML.

Its primary (and currently only) purpose is to add smart footnote functionality to Markdown.

Requirements

Movable Type (tested on 2.661 and 3.0.1D)
Markdown 1.0 or later
SmartyPants 1.5 or later (optional but strongly recommended.)

Installation

Install Markdown.pl, SmartyPants.pl and Bo.pl in your Movable Type plugin directory (typically mt/plugins).
Bö installs two new text formatting options, “Bö with Markdown” and “Bö with Markdown and SmartyPants”, the latter only if SmartyPants was installed.

Usage

Write your entries using Markdown markup, as you would do with the standard Markdown.

Footnotes are called from the text like this:

#[label]

Where label may contain A-Z, a-z, _ and -.

The footnote bodies can be placed anywhere in the text. They will be automatically moved to the end and sorted in cite order.

[label]: text

    Second paragraph

To indicate that a footnote has several paragraphs, the text must be indented by one tab or four spaces. The footnote body will be processed by Markdown.

You can backslash escape the # to prevent Bö from processing the footnote call:

\#[label]

Bugs

We don’t do bugs. No way, nada, never.

In the very unlikely case of Bö doing something you don’t want it to, contact us and if we like your tone, we may consider changing Bö’s behaviour.

Kidding, don’t hesitate to report bugs or send feature requests using the comment form on Bö’s latest release page.

Version History

1.0b3: Fri Aug 27, 2004

Enabled very basic escaping of # to allow unprocessed #[label]. Improved Read Me.
1.0b2: Thu Aug 26, 2004

First public release.

Author

Olivier Scherler
https://ithink.ch/bo

Additional Credits

John Gruber for writing Markdown, Smarty Pants and Daring Fireball;

http://daringfireball.net/
jr, for his invaluable opinion and the WordPress conversion

http://mycvs.org/
Timothy Appnel, for his patient answers on the Movable Type Developer Forum.

http://www.timaoutloud.org/

Copyright and License

Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:

Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.
Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.
Neither the name “Bö” nor the names of its contributors may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software without specific prior written permission.

This software is provided by the copyright holders and contributors “as is” and any express or implied warranties, including, but not limited to, the implied warranties of merchantability and fitness for a particular purpose are disclaimed. In no event shall the copyright owner or contributors be liable for any direct, indirect, incidental, special, exemplary, or consequential damages (including, but not limited to, procurement of substitute goods or services; loss of use, data, or profits; or business interruption) however caused and on any theory of liability, whether in contract, strict liability, or tort (including negligence or otherwise) arising in any way out of the use of this software, even if advised of the possibility of such damage.

Comments

# Robert Waugh, October 20, 2004 at 12:42

I can’t get Bo to work on Movable Type 3.11. I keep coming up with this error on my preview page: Use of uninitialized value in substitution (s///) at plugins/Bo.pl line 357. Oh wait. I just figured it out. Bo doesn’t work in the Extended Entry field, just the Entry Body. In fact, Markdown doesn’t seem to work properly in the Extended Entry if Bo is turned on. (The first link doesn’t get processed.) Is that expected? Perhaps you should just treat this as a feature request.

# Matthew, February 12, 2005 at 15:13

Hey, I’m loving the plugin and I’ve got it working perfectly on my localhost server (Apache 2, Perl 5.8.5) but I can’t get it to work on my proper, live web server (Apache 1.3, Perl 5.8.4). By not working I mean that a new text formatting option doesn’t appear when I upload Bo.pl - I only get the Markdown and Markdown with SmartyPants options that were already there. It works perfectly on my localhost so I am well and truly flummoxed as to what the problem could be. Have you any ideas?

# Olivier, February 16, 2005 at 17:45

Matthew: Is there any other difference between both systems, like the Movable Type, Markdown or SmartyPants versions?

Did you check that the execute bit is set on Bo.pl and that it has the correct line endings for your system? I got caught by these ones a couple of times I guess.

# Olivier, June 17, 2005 at 21:26

http://www.panimp.com/metablog/archives/2004/Oct/15/plugins

# nargalzius, July 21, 2005 at 16:42

Does this plugin still work with MT 3.1x? I’ve never ever seen the option “Bo with Markdown and SmartyPants” appear in my config even if I’m setup right.

I checked the pl file and linebreaks seem to be in order… like what you said with Matthew, is this a server issue? If it is, I wonder why the code can’t be tweaked to be more “friendly”… I mean Markdown and SP work regardless of the server setup right? I don’t see why this should be any different.

# Olivier, July 21, 2005 at 18:02

Well, since I have never gotten my hands on a server where it fails to load, it’s a bit difficult to say if it’s a server issue. It looks like a problem with detecting Markdown. Maybe with plugin load order.

Try this version of Bö:

and tell me:

If Bö appears under “Configure Active Plugins” on the main MT adminiistration page;
If “Bö detected Smartypants” appears as a text formatting option (it’s just for debugging);
If “Bö for MT 3 with Markdown” now appears as a text formatting option.

Then maybe I can help you further.

# nargalzius, July 23, 2005 at 09:54

Hi!

Thanks for the quick response :) I’m always pleased when I get to meet developers who actually “care” about the users (very few of you) so you have my respect.

Anyways, I tried your unreleased version and heres the info you asked for:

It DOES appear under configure Active Plugins (documentation being the only clickable item in it)

it still DOESN’T show the other two options (wether bo with markdown, or bo with smartypants, or bo with markdown AND smartypants, or any other variatio) Basically it doesn’t sho Bo at all, wether alone, or in conjunction with any other text formatting plugin (this is in the Weblog Configuration screen now)

I’m using the latest builds of MD and SP btw, just downloaded last night from fireball to be sure.

And to contribute, I’m not sure if it should have anything to do with having a lot of plugins, since I use a ton of them, but moved them temporarily when I tried Bo, leaving only the three (MD, SP, and Bo) as well as MT Blacklist.

I hope this information could help in your development :)

# Fred Krill, November 30, 2005 at 21:43

I got the same problem, as i upgraded to MT 3.2. Reading your idea ’It looks like a problem with detecting Markdown. Maybe with plugin load order.’ leads me to the solution: simply rename bo.pl to z_bo.pl and it works!

# Fred Krill, November 30, 2005 at 22:00

Sorry, rename to ZBo.pl, or zbo.pl! ZBo, zbo, Zbo.pl or zBo.pl doesn’t work.

# Joakim Hertze, July 3, 2009 at 12:34

Hello.

Is this plugin supposed to work on MT 4? Like commenteers above it doesn’t show up as a text filter on my install.

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