Excluding content from the Markdown

Settings → Markdown Alternate → Markdown output

Most page furniture never reaches the Markdown in the first place, because the plugin converts your blocks rather than scraping the rendered page — headers, menus, sidebars, cookie banners and anything injected into the_content are simply not part of the pipeline.

What is left is the furniture that lives inside the post: a subscription form in the middle of an article, a table of contents, a promo box. Four lists handle those.

The four lists

Field	Takes	Use for
Excluded shortcodes	Shortcode tags, without brackets	Forms, tables of contents, anything shortcode-driven
Excluded blocks	Block names, e.g. acme/promo	Blocks whose output is interface, not content
Excluded CSS classes	Class names, without the dot	Marking a section in the editor as not-for-Markdown
Excluded builder elements	Class names, without the dot	Page-builder chrome (currently Bricks — see Page builders)

One entry per line in each field.

The fourth list exists because a page-builder element is neither a shortcode nor a block: a Bricks form, for instance, is ordinary HTML by the time the plugin sees it, with no [contact-form-7]-style tag to match against. It works exactly like Excluded CSS classes — the entries are the class the builder puts on the element — but its built-in defaults come from the page builder itself rather than a fixed list, so they only appear when a page-builder integration is active.

Your entries add to the defaults

This is the part worth reading twice. The built-in defaults always apply, and whatever you type is added to them. Typing one tag into Excluded shortcodes does not switch the built-in form exclusions off.

The panel shows the current defaults under View built-in defaults. They cover the common form plugins — Contact Form 7, Gravity Forms, WPForms, Fluent Forms, Ninja Forms, Formidable — the common newsletter forms — MailerLite, Mailchimp for WordPress, MailPoet, The Newsletter Plugin, Brevo — the common table-of-contents plugins, and, for Excluded builder elements, Bricks’ own form, navigation menu, share, table-of-contents and breadcrumb elements.

Removing a default is possible, but deliberately requires code rather than a text field:

add_filter( 'sysmda_markdown_excluded_shortcodes', function ( array $tags ) {
  return array_diff( $tags, array( 'toc' ) );
} );

The asymmetry is intentional. Getting an exclusion wrong in the permissive direction publishes a form into every Markdown file on the site; getting it wrong in the restrictive direction drops a paragraph. The cheap path is the safe one.

Excluding a section while writing

Three class names work out of the box, on any block: no-md, md-exclude and exclude-from-markdown. Add one to a block’s Additional CSS class(es) field in the editor sidebar and that block — with everything nested inside it — is gone from the Markdown. The same works on a Bricks element, through its CSS Classes field.

The exclusion also applies to the front matter description, so an excluded section can never be summarised into the metadata of the very document that refuses to publish it.

Code samples are safe

An article that documents a shortcode is not the same as an article that uses one. Text inside a code block or an inline code span is never expanded and never stripped, so writing about [contact-form-7] in a tutorial leaves the example intact even though the tag is on the exclusion list.

Outside code, a shortcode you have not excluded is expanded normally, exactly as it is on the HTML page.

One case that looks like a bug and is not: a shortcode whose tag is not registered by any active plugin is left in the text as literal [foo], because that is what WordPress itself does. If you find a bare tag in your Markdown, check whether the plugin that provides it is still active before adding it to an exclusion list — the HTML page shows the same literal text.

Finding what to exclude

The practical method is to read the output. Open a few representative articles’ .md URLs — a long one, one with a form, one with a table of contents — and look for text that is interface rather than prose. A stray “Subscribe to our newsletter / Email / I agree to the privacy policy” sequence in the middle of an article is the classic signature.

After changing any of the three lists, saving invalidates the cache site-wide, so the next request shows the new result.