Markdown Guide

Accent CMS uses CommonMark-compliant markdown with a rich set of extensions enabled by default. You write plain markdown files with YAML frontmatter, and the engine renders them to HTML through an event-based pipeline that adds heading anchors, server-side syntax highlighting, wiki links, shortcodes, and more.

This chapter covers everything you need to author content: the day-to-day formatting syntax, the frontmatter fields that describe a page, the rendering pipeline that turns markdown into HTML, the shortcode system for embedding reusable components, diagram rendering, and the controls for tuning or disabling markdown processing per page or per site.

Most of what you need works out of the box – markdown is meant to be readable as plain text, and Accent CMS renders changes instantly with hot reload, so you can preview as you write.

In This Chapter

• Basic Formatting – headings, text styles, links and images, lists, code blocks with server-side syntax highlighting, blockquotes, and tables.
• Frontmatter – the YAML metadata block at the top of every page, the available fields, and using lead in templates.
• Rendering Pipeline – how markdown becomes HTML, the built-in event processors, pipeline metadata, heading anchors and deep linking, and building a table of contents.
• Shortcodes – embed rich, reusable components with square-bracket notation: inline and block syntax, built-in shortcodes, theme and plugin shortcodes, and resolution order.
• Diagrams – render Mermaid and Svgbob diagrams as inline SVG straight from your markdown.
• Processing Control & Markdown View – disable markdown per page, combine with iframes, and expose raw markdown source via .md URLs.
• Configuring Extensions – toggle smart punctuation, definition lists, superscript/subscript, admonitions, and math expressions.