Simple code editor/text formatter for user content (in Rails)

Question

I'd like to offer users the ability to style their submitted content, however I'm not sure I need a full blown wysiwyg editor. My requirements are:

• Allow bold with an asterix either side of word or phrase
• Allow underline with an underscore either side of word or phrase
• Allow up to two line breaks
• Automatically parse links
• Automatically embed videos from youtube links (and other video hosts)
• Automatically embed photos from any url ending in a valid image format
• (and include tags to allow the above to be carried out manually).

A live preview would also be handy.

Any ideas on my options, and/or the best way to approach this? Perhaps a simplified or customizable markdown editor?

Answer 1

BlueCloth isn't a bad choice - I've used it with some success. It's a markdown parser that you can have operate on your text fields/textarea fields that provides a syntax similar to the syntax in use on StackOverflow, and similar to your requirements.

You can specify which types of inputs are HTML escaped, and which ones are treated as raw HTML, so that links and <embed> tags and such can either be displayed in your views as plain text, or treated as HTML.