PHP Toolkit

Markdown

Bidirectional converter between Markdown and WordPress block markup. Useful for moving content between Markdown files and WordPress while preserving the structures both formats can express.

composer require wp-php-toolkit/markdown

Many publishing workflows start in Markdown: documentation sites, static-site generators, Git-backed editorial workflows, Obsidian vaults, and developer notes. WordPress stores editor content as block markup. Moving between those worlds by string replacement loses metadata and quickly breaks on lists, tables, code blocks, and frontmatter.

The Markdown component provides a structured bridge. MarkdownConsumer turns Markdown plus frontmatter into block markup and metadata; MarkdownProducer turns supported block markup back into Markdown. The conversion is meant for practical content workflows, not byte-identical round-tripping of every custom block attribute.

Markdown to blocks

Feed Markdown into MarkdownConsumer, get block markup back. The result is a BlocksWithMetadata object (defined in WordPress\DataLiberation\DataFormatConsumer — the shared shape every DataFormatConsumer in the toolkit emits) that holds both the rendered blocks and any frontmatter parsed from the document.

<?php
require '/wordpress/wp-content/php-toolkit/vendor/autoload.php';

use WordPress\Markdown\MarkdownConsumer;

$result = ( new MarkdownConsumer( "# Hello\n\nWelcome to **WordPress**." ) )->consume();
echo $result->get_block_markup();

Round-trip: blocks back to Markdown

Pair MarkdownProducer with MarkdownConsumer to convert in either direction. Round-tripping is lossy for block attributes that have no Markdown representation (custom classes, alignment), so do not expect byte-perfect equality.

<?php
require '/wordpress/wp-content/php-toolkit/vendor/autoload.php';

use WordPress\Markdown\MarkdownConsumer;
use WordPress\Markdown\MarkdownProducer;

$md       = "## Round trip\n\n- one\n- two\n- three\n";
$blocks   = ( new MarkdownConsumer( $md ) )->consume();
$markdown = ( new MarkdownProducer( $blocks ) )->produce();

echo $markdown;

Reading YAML frontmatter as post meta

Frontmatter keys come back as arrays so a single key can hold multiple values. Use get_meta_value() when you only want the first scalar.

<?php
require '/wordpress/wp-content/php-toolkit/vendor/autoload.php';

use WordPress\Markdown\MarkdownConsumer;

$md = <<<MD
---
post_title: "The Name of the Wind"
post_status: publish
tags: [fantasy, kingkiller]
---

Once upon a time...
MD;

$consumer = new MarkdownConsumer( $md );
$consumer->consume();

echo 'Title: '   . $consumer->get_meta_value( 'post_title' )  . "\n";
echo 'Status: '  . $consumer->get_meta_value( 'post_status' ) . "\n";
$metadata = $consumer->get_all_metadata();
echo 'Tags: ' . implode( ', ', $metadata['tags'][0] ) . "\n";

Migrating an Obsidian or Hugo folder of Markdown

Walk a directory of .md files (Obsidian vault, Hugo content/, Jekyll _posts) and emit one block-markup record per file.

<?php
require '/wordpress/wp-content/php-toolkit/vendor/autoload.php';

use WordPress\Markdown\MarkdownConsumer;

@mkdir( '/tmp/vault', 0777, true );
file_put_contents( '/tmp/vault/welcome.md', "---\ntitle: Welcome\n---\n\nHello world." );
file_put_contents( '/tmp/vault/roadmap.md', "# Roadmap\n\n1. Ship\n2. Iterate" );

foreach ( glob( '/tmp/vault/*.md' ) as $path ) {
	$consumer = new MarkdownConsumer( file_get_contents( $path ) );
	$consumer->consume();
	$title = $consumer->get_meta_value( 'title' );
	if ( ! $title ) $title = basename( $path, '.md' );
	echo "=== $title ($path) ===\n";
	echo substr( $consumer->get_block_markup(), 0, 120 ) . "...\n\n";
}

Counting blocks produced by a Markdown document

After conversion, the block markup is plain WordPress block markup, so parse_blocks() works on it directly. The standard way to introspect what the converter emitted before saving to the database.

<?php
require '/wordpress/wp-content/php-toolkit/vendor/autoload.php';

use WordPress\Markdown\MarkdownConsumer;

$md = <<<MD
# Title

A paragraph with **bold** and *italics*.

| Col A | Col B |
|-------|-------|
| 1     | 2     |

```php
echo 'hi';
```

> A quote.
MD;

$blocks = ( new MarkdownConsumer( $md ) )->consume()->get_block_markup();
$counts = array();
$queue  = parse_blocks( $blocks );

while ( $queue ) {
	$block = array_shift( $queue );
	if ( null !== $block['blockName'] ) {
		$name             = $block['blockName'];
		$counts[ $name ] = isset( $counts[ $name ] ) ? $counts[ $name ] + 1 : 1;
	}
	foreach ( $block['innerBlocks'] as $inner_block ) {
		$queue[] = $inner_block;
	}
}
foreach ( $counts as $name => $count ) {
	echo "{$name}: {$count}\n";
}

See also