If you’re torn between a WYSIWYG editor and something clean like Textile/Redcloth, then markItUp! will provide you with some nice middle ground. The tool is well documented, but there are a few “notes” for installing it in Rails that aren’t in the docs.
1. Initial setup
Since there’s overhead associated with markItUp!, I set a variable @content_submission to true so that my standard layout template can skip all of the extra javascript when it’s not necessary. To keep things simple, I’m going to follow the markItUp! hierarchy, which means it’s stylesheets will be in your javascripts path.