So I'm starting prototyping on an all new thing and I it want to be commercially successful out of the gate. That's a bit different for me where I usually focus initially on the code. This means thinking, from not just day 1 but hour 1, about how the customer sees things and for me that starts with two pages on the site:

• about
• faq

I would argue that for any web thing, an about page and a faq are at the core of your marketing. And since both of these are content, I can't see the point of using straight erb or haml views when MarkDown is so damn easy. I wouldn't use markdown for a page where there were forms or UI elements but for content? Hell yes!

How to Use Markdown for Rails Views

• In your Gemfile you need to call the kramdown-rails gem: gem 'kramdown-rails'
• Do the bundle install happy dance
• In your app/views/controller_name directory create your views with a .md extension

The kramdown-rails gem is a light wrapper around the core kramdown gem which does the markdown to html translation and supports using it in an Rails view context.

Just to be a good internet citizen I added the content of this answer to StackOverflow on Rails Markdown. If you have the time and like this then I'd appreciate an upvote. Thanks!