I hacked together a quick plugin for the most excellent gitit wiki today. It’s written in Haskell, so it’s an absolute pleasure to write code for it.

What I added support for is a neat little tool called ditaa (DIagrams Through Ascii Art). Basically, in the markdown source of your Gitit wiki you can now write something like the following:

~~~ {.ditaa}
+--------+   +-------+    +-------+
|        | --+ ditaa +--> |       |
|  Text  |   +-------+    |diagram|
|Document|   |!magic!|    |       |
|     {d}|   |       |    |       |
+---+----+   +-------+    +-------+
    :                         ^
    |       Lots of work      |
    +-------------------------+
~~~

The plugin will then call out to the ditaa command line tool (written in Java, boo!) to render that to a beautiful image:

A ditaa image on a Gitit page

To get this set up for yourself, try the following from the root of your Gitit wiki:

git clone git://github.com/batterseapower/gitit-plugins.git batterseapower-plugins
wget http://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/ditaa/ditaa/0.9/ditaa0_9.zip?use_mirror=kent -O ditaa0_9.zip
unzip ditaa0_9.zip

Now edit your Gitit configuration file so the plugins list includes my plugin:

plugins: batterseapower-plugins/Ditaa.hs

That’s it - restart Gitit and you should be ready to go!