Description

This is an addon for the Postie plugin (email-to-post). It does nothing on its own – Postie must be installed and active.

By default, Postie saves emailed content as a flat HTML/text blob, so a post created from an email opens in the block editor as one big Classic/HTML block rather than proper paragraph/heading/image blocks – and a big blob is difficult to edit afterward.

SLNWP Html and MD Blocks for Postie converts that emailed content into real, individually-editable Gutenberg blocks before the post is saved with the ability to further format using markdown syntax within <md>...</md>.

Rich HTML emails (Outlook/Gmail-style formatted mail) are normalized into blocks.
Markdown syntax (#/## headings, blank-line paragraphs, **bold**, [links](url), */- lists, > quotes) wrapped in an explicit <md>...</md> block is parsed into native blocks. See the FAQ below.
Emailed photo attachments become core/image blocks referencing the real WordPress attachment Postie already created, not bare <img> tags.
Bullet and numbered lists become real core/list blocks (with each item as its own core/list-item, including nested sub-lists), not plain text.
Blockquotes (>) become real core/quote blocks, with their contents as native inner blocks.
Anything not yet natively mapped (code, tables – deferred past v1) falls back to a core/html block, so content is never silently dropped.

Screenshots

The plugin's settings page, under Postie's menu - turn HTML block conversion and Markdown parsing on or off independently. — The plugin’s settings page, under Postie’s menu – turn HTML block conversion and Markdown parsing on or off independently.

Installation

Install and activate Postie first.
Install and activate this plugin.
Optionally visit Postie’s settings > HTML & Markdown Blocks to toggle Markdown parsing and/or Gutenberg block conversion independently (both on by default).

FAQ

How do I get Markdown syntax converted?

Wrap the part of the email you want parsed as Markdown in <md> and </md> tags, each on their own line:

<md>
# My Heading
* A list item
* Another item
</md>

This is deliberate, not automatic: this plugin never guesses whether some arbitrary content “looks like” Markdown – only content inside an explicit <md>...</md> block is ever parsed as Markdown. Content outside the wrapper (or the whole email, if you don’t use one) is treated as plain content. As a side benefit, content inside <md>...</md> is also fully shielded from Postie’s own content-processing (its newline-collapsing, ----line signature stripping, and #subject# inline-subject extraction all run before this plugin ever sees the content, and could otherwise silently damage unwrapped Markdown syntax that happens to resemble one of those conventions) – using <md> sidesteps all of that automatically, with no workaround needed.

Reviews

There are no reviews for this plugin.

Contributors & Developers

“SLNWP Html and MD Blocks for Postie” is open source software. The following people have contributed to this plugin.

James Harvey

Translate “SLNWP Html and MD Blocks for Postie” into your language.

Interested in development?

Browse the code, check out the SVN repository, or subscribe to the development log by RSS.

Changelog

0.1.19

Change: text domain is now slnwp-blocks-for-postie to match the WordPress.org plugin slug, so translate.wordpress.org language packs load

0.1.18

Change: Cosmetic rename to “SLNWP Html and MD Blocks for Postie” (slug slnwp-blocks-for-postie): display name, bootstrap filename, Plugin URI, readme title, and Strings copy – namespace, constants, option name, text domain unchanged

0.1.17

Fix: an email link that a mail client auto-linked a second time (producing an anchor nested inside another anchor – e.g. a mailto: from a Word doc re-linked by Gmail/Thunderbird) no longer produces an invalid block; the redundant outer link is flattened away before conversion.

0.1.16

Fix: text alignment set on a container element (a centered

div>/, or an aligned

div> that only uses
for line breaks – as Outlook/OWA and Word produce) is now inherited by the paragraphs, headings, lists and images inside it, instead of being dropped.

0.1.15

New: settings page is now dark-mode aware – its bracketed-card panels and the example box get a readable dark palette when a WP dashboard dark-mode plugin (body.dark-mode) is active.

0.1.14

Change: shorten display name to ‘Soulsong HTML and MD Blocks for Postie’ (‘Markdown’ -> ‘MD’); display name only – no functional change.

0.1.13

Change: rename to Soulsong HTML and Markdown Blocks for Postie (branding only – no functional change).
Housekeeping: require PHP 8.2, mark tested up to WordPress 7.1, update contributor info.

0.1.12

Fix: a block-level element (e.g. a heading) malformed mail-client HTML left nested inside a paragraph no longer produces an invalid block – it now converts to its own proper block instead of being flattened into the paragraph’s raw HTML
Fix: leftover non-visible markup (e.g. Word’s tags) no longer produces a pointless blank paragraph block at the top of the post

0.1.11

Fix: mail-client HTML (e.g. Word paste) wrapped in a

div> no longer collapses into a single opaque HTML block instead of converting to real blocks
* Fix: an inline image wrapped in a no-op (e.g. Word’s mso-no-proof span) now becomes its own image block instead of being lost inside a paragraph
* New: preserve paragraph/heading text alignment and image alignment (left/center/right) from the source HTML
* Fix: converted heading blocks now include the wp-block-heading class Gutenberg expects

0.1.10

Change: renamed from Postie Blocks Addon to HTML and Markdown Blocks for Postie – slug, namespace, constants, option name (with automatic migration), settings menu slug, and CSS classes all updated to match; no functional changes

0.1.9

Fix: WordPress.WP.I18n.NonSingularStringLiteralText Plugin Check error – Strings::get() now looks up a plain array of pre-translated strings instead of passing a dynamic value into __(), since __()’s first argument must be a literal string for WordPress’s translation tooling to find it

0.1.8

Change: Markdown is now only ever parsed inside an explicit … block – the previous heuristic that guessed whether arbitrary content looked like Markdown has been removed entirely
Change: settings page rewritten in the positive (what each setting does, not what breaks when off), with the now-unnecessary Recommended/Known Conflict sections removed
Change: Markdown toggle renamed to ‘Convert Markdown to Gutenberg Blocks’ with a worked example shown directly on the settings page

0.1.7

Change: renamed from Postie Markdown Blocks to Postie Blocks Addon – block conversion is the primary feature, Markdown parsing is a secondary/optional one. Namespace, constants, option name (with automatic migration), settings slug, and CSS classes all updated to match; no functional changes

0.1.6

New: blockquotes now convert to real core/quote blocks (with native inner blocks) instead of falling back to core/html
Change: settings page and readme FAQ now lead with the … marker as the single recommended fix for all of Postie’s own content-processing conflicts, not just the list one

0.1.5

New: independent settings toggles for Markdown parsing and Gutenberg block conversion – block conversion can now be turned off entirely (previously always on)

0.1.4

New: wrap Markdown content in … to shield it from Postie’s own newline-collapsing and signature/subject-marker collisions – fixes lists and headings-followed-by-lists coming through merged or corrupted

0.1.3

Fix: Markdown list items with mail-client whitespace padding right after the marker were becoming indented code blocks instead of plain list text
Fix: literal backslashes in emailed content (e.g. Windows file paths) were being doubled when Postie saved the post – now preserved correctly

0.1.2

Fix: Markdown was never parsed for real mail-client HTML – Thunderbird wraps each paragraph in its own

p>, which made every paragraph individually opaque to Parsedown’s raw-HTML-passthrough rule
* Fix: a bare URL auto-linked by the mail client inside Markdown image/link syntax (e.g. Thunderbird’s freetext links) broke image/link recognition – now unwrapped before parsing
* New: bullet and numbered lists now convert to real core/list blocks (with nested sub-list support) instead of falling back to core/html

0.1.1

Fix: inline images within paragraph text now become their own core/image block instead of being embedded in the paragraph’s HTML
Fix: plain-text paragraphs and text preceding an inline image were silently dropped due to a simple_html_dom quirk (children() excludes text nodes)
Fix: Markdown detection now based on content patterns rather than which MIME part the email populated, so HTML-wrapped plain-text emails (Gmail/Outlook) no longer collapse to one block
Fix: horizontal rules (—) now become a core/separator block instead of being silently dropped

0.1.0

Initial release: Markdown/HTML -> Gutenberg blocks conversion for paragraphs, headings, and images.