The readme.txt of a WordPress plugin needs to be formatted in a specific way, as shown in the example readme. Parts of that are already Markdown formatting, but, for example, the headlines are formatted differently. In this post, I show you a tool which converts the WordPress readme format into valid Markdown.
If I copy the readme.txt content into a readme.md, it looks like it could be optimized a bit (the screenshot is from GitHub):
The headlines are not highlighted, and the plugin headers are in one line (okay, the latter could be fixed by just adding two spaces after each header).
Luckily, there is a project called WP Readme to Markdown – a converter that correctly formats the headlines, plugin headers, and inserts screenshots. There is also a CLI version, that can be run after changing the readme.txt easily – theoretically automatic of course, for example via an NPM script with watcher plugin.
But I did not want to through NPM or similar on my plugin, just to get this ability, so I run the command by hand. After installing the CLI via Composer, you go the to vendor/bin directory in the console and run the following command:
wp2md -i ../../readme.txt -o ../../README.md
That converts the readme.txt from the root directory of the project into a README.md. The result looks like that:
If someone has an idea, how to get this automated with nothing but Composer and Git, let me know 🙂