Markdown - Rich Text in Podio

Posted: 2015-09-11

A very undocumented feature of Podio is the ability to use Rich Text in many fields. The system that Podio implemented is called MarkDown.

Markdown is actually pretty cool, and we use a flavour of markdown to manage this blog content.

Pretty much any multi-line field in Podio that does not have the formatting bar allows MarkDown. This includes messages, comments, single-line text fields, and calculation fields.

Here is a quick reference to what you can do and how to do it:

Bold and Italics

For bold and italics you just use a single or double asterisk:

*italics*
**bold**

Strikethrough

To strikethrough text, use:

~~strikethrough~~

Blockquotes

You can indicate blockquotes with >:

> quoted text

Headings

Headings are easy to do - just use the hash character or multiples thereof to indicate the heading level:

# Heading Level 1
## Heading Level 2
### Heading Level 3

Lists

Bulleted Lists are done using the asterisk, and numbered lists with the number followed by a period:

* bulleted item
1. numbered item

Note that you can also create nested lists this way.

Horizontal Lines

To separate content using a horizontal line, use three dashes:

---

Images

You can easily include images from a local path or a remote URL:

![Alt text](/path/to/img.jpg "Optional title")
eg ![](http://www.domain.com/path/to/img.jpg)

Links

And you can easily create links:

[link text](http://example.com/)

You can also combine images and links to make

[![](http://domain.com/someimage.png)](http://domain.com)

You can also create relative on-page links to headings. If you created a heading with:

# foo

You can link back to it with:

[foo](#foo)

YouTube Videos

With a combination of images and links, you can fake insert YouTube videos:

[![IMAGE ALT TEXT HERE](http://img.youtube.com/vi/YOUTUBE_VIDEO_ID_HERE/0.jpg)](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YOUTUBE_VIDEO_ID_HERE)

Tables

Tables are not a standard of MarkDown, but Podio implements GitHub's flavour of markdown. You can make tables as follows:

Column 1 Heading | Column 2 Heading
--- | ---
Cell Content | Cell Content
Cell Content | Cell Content

And if you want to align columns, use colons as in:

Column Left | Column Centered | Column Right
:--- |:---:| ---:
Lorem | Dolor | 1
Ipsum | Set | 42

Emojis

You can even add emojis to your text

:stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

For a full list of emoji's, see this page

Code

To insert code, use the backtick operator:

`<html>` rocks = <html> rocks

For code blocks, use three backticks to start and end the block:

```
function foo() {
return "bar";
}
```

Comments

Although this may seem a little useless in Podio, you can add comments to markdown using:

[comment]: # (My comment here)

Comments are not displayed, but you can edit them.

by Andreas Huttenrauch
Owner of Globi Web Solutions, and Podio Fanatic.