Docpad pages start with a header description like
---
title: "regrets"
isPost: true
active: true
tags:
- grammar
- notes
---
however when that is rendered in pure markdown, as added to a github wiki, it comes out really ugly. (see below). Is there a way to use any type of formatting on the docpad header so it will also look nice when editing in a markdown environment (such as github wiki) that is not intelligent to the headers?
Alternatively are there other wiki like CMS that work really well for editing the content of a docpad site? I want to have authors work on the content and then we can publish it easily using docpad.
normally comes out just like this:
title: "regrets" isPost: true active: true tags: - grammar
Metadata is a non-standard feature of Markdown. It is only supported by some implementations and not even in the same way by each. If you want consistent behavior across implementations, then the best approach is to use only standard features.
That said, sometimes you may have a good reason for using a non-standard feature. However, when you do, you simply have to accept that it will likely look ugly in other implementations; metadata being a notable example.
One of the Markdown implementations that GitHub uses (they have 2 or 3 depending in which part of the site you are using) puts the metadata into a table. While the table is not styled fancy to look nice, at least the data is readable. However, to accomplish that, the Markdown parser's behavior is altered to output different HTML. It is not simply a matter of styling the default HTML.
Of course, most metadata extensions/plugins for Markdown implementations actually extract the date, not display it as a table. Therefore, to get your desired behavior, you would probably need to build your own extension/plugin for the Markdown implementation you are using and then tell your CMS to use that extension/plugin. Of course, if you are using a third party tool (like GitHub's wiki) then you only get the features they choose to support and you are stuck with that. If you want to choose your own set of features, then you should either be running your own server or use a static site generator (more here) to build the site yourself. In either case, you get to choose which implementation/features you have available to you.