SmartyPants 1.5b1

[John Gruber]

This is probably only of interest if you're using MT, but
SmartyPants 1.5b1 is out:

    http://daringfireball.net/projects/smartypants/SmartyPants_1.5b1.zip

This is a private beta, specific to Markdown users.

There are a few other minor changes, but the big new feature in SP
1.5 is integration with Markdown. How it works is that if you only
have Markdown installed in your MT plugins folders, you'll get one
new filtering option in your Text Formatting pop-up menu:

    Markdown

But if you have both Markdown *and* SmartyPants 1.5 (or later)
installed, you'll see two new filters:

    Markdown
    Markdown With SmartyPants

The latter provides automatic SmartyPants punctuation processing to
your posts.

This is in contrast to Brad Choate's MT-Textile, which offers
automatic integration with SmartyPants, but does not make it
optional -- if you have both MT-Textile and SmartyPants installed,
you always get SmartyPants processing in your posts. I suspect most
Markdown users will want to use the automatic version, but I, for
one, don't -- I still want to invoke SmartyPants from my templates.

This trick required an update to SmartyPants, because plugins load
in alphabetical order, and so when Markdown loads, it doesn't "see"
SmartyPants yet. I've added the same code to both plugins, so it
should work even if you rename the plugins such that they load in
the opposite order.

-J.G.