By default IkiWiki uses Markdown as source code for the webpages.

There are a variety of dialects of Markdown. We talk about some prominent samples on this page.

Plain Perl Markdown

The original Markdown by John Gruber is written in Perl and is the default used by IkiWiki.

See the legendary syntax description.

PHP Markdown extra

A PHP implementation with extra syntax which became inspiration for other Markdown compiler implementations.

Homepage:
https://michelf.ca/projects/php-markdown/extra/

MultiMarkdown

A Perl implementation inspired by PHP Markdown extra.

Homepage:
http://fletcherpenney.net/multimarkdown/

MultiMarkdown can be enabled via a configuration option in IkiWiki and is enabled in this Wiki.

User Manual:
http://fletcher.github.io/MultiMarkdown-4/

CommonMark

This is not a dialect, but rather a project to unambiguously describe Markdown syntax and semantic.

Homepage:
http://commonmark.org/

Pandoc

Pandoc is fabulous. The different options for Markdown compilation are described in the first paragraphs of: http://pandoc.org/README.html.

Recently y stumbled upon R Markdown which embeds Markdown via Pandoc in Rstudio which is an Integrated development environment for the R language.

Off topic but I found it worth noting it.

Discount

Is a C (programming language) implementation of a Markdown compiler. The differences to original Markdown are described here.

Discount can be used for IkiWiki instead of the Perl implementation for increased speed/reduced ressource consumption of the compilation process.