I have released Plerd version 2.000, its first major-version increase since version 1.0 from 2015. The primary motivation for the number-bump comprises a couple of significant changes in Plerd’s dependencies and behavior:

• Plerd now reads blog source files using the GitHub Flavored Markdown (GFM) dialect, instead of MultiMarkdown.

• Plerd now requires Perl version 5.26 (released in 2017) or later.

Considered together, these differences make a breaking change for Plerd, deserving a major version increase on their own. Beyond that, it feels appropriate to increase the major version number to reflect my return to active Plerd development after letting the project sit unmaintained for many years.

Plerd’s internal Markdown parsing and conversion engine is now Markdown::Perl. This lets your blog’s source files use GFM, the Markdown dialect which has grown in ubiquity since Plerd’s origins in the mid-2010s. More to the point, it’s what I’ve grown used to over the years, and it’s nice to be able to use “code fence” syntax and see it work as expected. Thanks to all who filed issues about this.

The change in Markdown processing engine does mean that source posts making use of MultiMarkdown-specific syntax, such as footnotes and definition lists, might render incorrectly after upgrading to Plerd 2.000. If so, you’ll need to edit these posts’ source files appropriately.

If you run (or can install) Perl 5.26 or later, and if the switch to GFM isn’t a deal-breaker, then I recommend upgrading to Plerd 2. You can install it manually from source, or through CPAN. As always, the README file has all the details. As noted in that file, I plan to continue making Plerd version 1 available, but I don’t plan to update or back-port any future Plerd 2 features to it, other than critical security fixes and the like.

“number 2” by Leo Reynolds is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.