[ANN] PHP Markdown Lib 1.3 (Beta 4)

[Michel Fortin]

This is basically a pre-announcement. I'll make the announcement more official by posting it on my blog when it goes out of beta.

There's a new branch to PHP Markdown. It contains the two exact same parsers found in PHP Markdown and PHP Markdown Extra, but without all the cruft. In other words: is packaged to be used as a library, and only as a library. The two parsers classes are in the Michelf namespace:

	\Michelf\Markdown
	\Michelf\MarkdownExtra

Yep, a namespace, so it requires PHP 5.3 or later.

The Lib branch is [PSR-0] compliant, allowing easy autoloading of its parser classes. It is also a [Composer] package made [available on Packagist][aop].

It's currently in beta. Now's a good time to make breaking changes, if you have any to suggest.

[PSR-0]: https://github.com/php-fig/fig-standards/blob/master/accepted/PSR-0.md
[Composer]: http://getcomposer.org
[aop]: https://packagist.org/packages/michelf/php-markdown


## Moving forward

Here's the plan: next year, in 2014, only the Lib branch will continue to be updated.

The original PHP Markdown and PHP Markdown Extra distributions will continue to be available and they certainly won't stop working overnight, but starting next year updates containing bug fixes and new Extra features will go exclusively to the Lib branch.

Ditching support for older versions of PHP will simplify the maintenance work and will enable usage of newer PHP constructs in the code. Getting rid of the Wordpress plugin part will let me worry about things which are more related to the parser side of things.


-- 
Michel Fortin
michel.fortin at michelf.ca
http://michelf.ca/