From FormatBreaks to Markdown

[John Gruber]

Jay Allen <markdown at openwire.com> wrote on 04/18/04 at 2:12p:

> It wasn't clear to me that Markdown would handle my previous content 
> formatted with FormatBreaks seamlessly.  It in fact does, which is 
> great.

Good. One goal for the format is to design such that you can use as little or as much as you want.


> However, I cannot just remove the format_breaks tag from the template 
> and start using Markdown from now on.  What I must do, is go into MySQL 
> and change all of the entry_convert_breaks values in the mt_entry table 
> for my previous entries to 'markdown' instead of '__default__' and THEN 
> remove the tag from the templates.  If I don't change the previous 
> entries, they will not be formatted correctly.  Correct?

Yes, I suppose that if you didn't change them all to Markdown,
they'd be formatted with MT's built-in default line-breaks option.

Just goes to show how hard it is to completely avoid format-specific
"lock-in", no? I'm not making fun -- I sympathize with your plight.
No matter how you stored entry data in the db, there might come a
day when you want those old entries stored in some other format.

Let me know how this works for you. Or how it's gone for you
already, considering how long it's been since you posted this, for
which delay in responding I apologize.

-J.G.