Way back in 2008, I announced a plugin for WordPress that made it easy to insert short bits of screenplay-like material into a blog post.
EXT. HOUSE -- DAY
Max is checking his mail when he spots neighbor FRANK crossing the street, heading his way.
Shaking his head...
MAX
I thought we talked about this, Frank.
FRANK
(drunk)
I was born naked and I’m not changing now.
I called these chunks “scrippets.” This plain-text format ultimately became Fountain, which in turn became the basis of Highland and other screenwriting apps.1
The Scrippets plugin still works — you can install it today — but WordPress has moved on to the concept of “blocks.” These are discrete elements of a post that can do specific things. You can find blocks for code syntax, tables, and even poetry verse.
There should be one for Fountain.
If you’re a WordPress coder who’d like to tackle this project, here are some thoughts to get you started.
- Visit Fountain.io/developer and the GitHub for implementations of the parser.
- While I’d love to support the whole Fountain spec, I’m not convinced title pages and headers/footers make sense for this use case.
- Notes and synopses are super useful. We’ll want to style them so they’re visually distinct.
- Forced elements are very important. Blog posts often center on weird edge cases, and international users may need to force character names like @黄.
- Ultimately, it’ll be best if there’s one “official” Fountain block plugin, but if multiple people decide to tackle it, my team and I can help coordinate.
- This would be presumably be GPL licensed. This is for the good of the internet, not any one company or person.
So if you feel like giving it a shot, go for it! You certainly don’t need our permission.
If you have something you’d like us to see, or a question we can answer, write ask@johnaugust.com
- One of the coders who put together the WordPress plugin was Nima Yousefi, who has now coded nearly everything we’ve made. ↩