SyntaxHighlighter is quite a nice wordpress plugin that provides syntax highlighting for a range of programming languages (among them my favorites python & C#). the problem is, in its original unadulterated form it doesn’t play with my favorite markup plugin php markdown extra at all :-(

after quite a bit of hacking, it transpires that one can make them play nicely with one another. the idea that i pursued was to change the [source:XXX] tag to < source lang=XXX> and have php markdown treat it the same as the < pre> tag.¹

getting markdown extra to recognize the < source> tag is fairly easy², i needed to change # Tags treated as block tags only if the opening tag is alone on it’s line: var $context_block_tags = ‘script|noscript|math|ins|del’; to read # Tags treated as block tags only if the opening tag is alone on it’s line: var $context_block_tags = ‘script|noscript|math|ins|del|source’;

next, in the syntax plugin, all occurrences of [source: are replaced by < source lang=.

i’ve created ZIP files of the modified SyntaxHighlighter and Markdown Extra plugins, share and enjoy.