28-Jul-2026 — Visual editing replaces markdown authoring

The change in one sentence

You edit website text with a visual (WYSIWYG) editor. You no longer write markdown codes to change the site.

What members and content editors experience

When you turn on site edit (or edit a walk description, group event description, or help block), you get TipTap: type normally, use the toolbar for headings, lists, links, tables and colour, and save. What you see while editing is what visitors get on the public page.

There is no Edit/view toggle for each field. Site edit means the visual editor; leaving site edit means the normal public page.

On busy pages (for example contact-us), the formatting toolbar only appears when you click into a field, so the page stays calm until you are actually changing something.

Before and after

Not every group site has the new editor yet. EKWG is still on the previous markdown editor, so you can open ekwg.co.uk/contact-us, turn on site edit, and see the old workflow for real. The first two screenshots below are from that live site. The last two show the new TipTap experience on the NGX Ramblers staging site (ngx-ramblers.org.uk).

Still live on EKWG today: turn on site edit for contact-us and every text column gets its own Edit button. On a committee page that means a lot of green chrome before you have changed a single word.

Still live on EKWG today: click Edit and you type markdown codes (# for a heading,
for a line break) in a raw text box. The toolbar is for inserting those codes, not for seeing the finished look.

New visual editor on the NGX Ramblers staging site: same contact-us pattern in site edit. No per-field Edit/view toggle. The heading already looks like a heading; the formatting toolbar stays out of the way until you click into a field.

New visual editor on staging: click a field and the toolbar appears (bold, headings, lists, links, tables, colour). What you see while editing is what visitors get.

Where markdown still exists

This change is only about how people edit pages in the browser. It does not change the Content Export API, storage format, or machine-readable outputs.

Content is still stored as markdown text. The public API still serves markdown exactly as before, for example:

• GET /api/public/content/path/<path>?format=markdown
• page URLs with ?format=markdown
• Accept: text/markdown

Those endpoints, response media type (text/markdown), and JSON fields such as contentMarkdown are unchanged and remain required for AI, crawlers, and integrations.

Site authors do not need to learn or type that format in the UI. The visual editor and the site handle conversion for them.

Pasting

If you already have markdown (from a doc, an old page, or a technical export) and you paste it into the visual editor, TipTap turns it into normal formatted content. That is the only everyday moment markdown still “matters” — and even then you do not have to understand the syntax; paste and continue editing visually.

What this is not

• We have not removed markdown as a storage or interchange format.
• The Content Export API markdown format is fully retained and must not be treated as optional or deprecated.
• Public pages still render stored content for visitors (via the same pipeline as before).
• Migration and export tools still use markdown for technical reasons; only the site-authoring UI is visual.

Practical tips

1. Click into a text field to edit; click away when finished.
2. Use the toolbar for structure and links — no codes to memorise.
3. Image-only columns stay as images until you choose add text under column settings.
4. If you paste messy HTML or large pastes with many images, the site may offer to split content into rows; that is optional help, not a markdown lesson.

Related product work

This continues the TipTap work started for email and walks (ref #303): one visual editor for rich text, with markdown kept as a silent interchange format rather than something non-technical people must learn.