Google-drive – How to Google Docs and markdown play nice

I've hunted around the interwebs for just this solution, and HIGHLY recommend using Markdown Here. It is a browser extension for Chrome, Firefox and Safari that lets one toggle back-and-forth between Markdown and HTML. It's original use-case is for in composing e-mail, but it "works great" in Google Sites. Also, it supports TeX math formula, which for researchers, I would imagine could be quite useful.

FWIW, I started down the path of using the Markdown Site Editor suggested by @dnozay, but it seemed overly complicated for a few reasons:

• It forces each site maintainer to add it for Markdown functionality.
• It has the potential to break as Google's tools change, and someone then has to get the latest version (possibly for each site).
• Some environments have scripting and/or google app engine hobbled for security/policy/etc. reasons
• Philosophically, it makes Google Sites try to be something it's not.

Using Markdown Here means

• No additional code needs to be added to each google site.
• It is a well maintained tool that is installed once in a browser and useful is in many places (e-mail, sites, blogger, facebook, tumblr, tinymce, etc.)
• The onus of responsibility is on the individual who wants to use Markdown (and TeX).
• It let's Sites be Sites, and Markdown writers be Markdown writers.

It seems the real problem lies in the fact that embedded scripts are ignored in posts, most likely for security issues.

But it is possible to load JS within the description field when you go to "Customize your blog" (Kind of defeats the previous statement)

So you may be able to use a JS library (I think Write Capture might help) that allows you to write Javascript to specific parts of the document and use a parser to search and replace for phrases for example

[gist 1256020]
<div class="gistr">1256020</div>

Then you use a parser to deal with it. Or wrap Gist IDs in div element with say a class, iterate through all elements with that class and replace the id with the Gist using the Write Capture function So as you can see... it ends up going into a programming problem which is outside the scope of this site.