What best practices should be considered when developing a custom markup language in PHP for a content management system?

When developing a custom markup language in PHP for a content management system, it is important to consider best practices such as ensuring the markup is easy to read and write, implementing proper error handling, and sanitizing input to prevent security vulnerabilities. Additionally, it is recommended to provide clear documentation for users and developers to understand how to use the custom markup language effectively.

// Example of implementing a custom markup language in PHP for a content management system

// Define the custom markup tags and their corresponding HTML output
$markup_tags = array(
    'bold' => '<strong>{content}</strong>',
    'italic' => '<em>{content}</em>',
    'link' => '<a href="{url}">{text}</a>'
);

// Function to parse the custom markup and replace tags with HTML
function parse_custom_markup($content) {
    global $markup_tags;
    
    foreach ($markup_tags as $tag => $html) {
        $pattern = '/\[' . $tag . '=(.*?)\](.*?)\[\/' . $tag . '\]/';
        $replacement = str_replace(array('{url}', '{text}', '{content}'), array('$1', '$2', '$2'), $html);
        $content = preg_replace($pattern, $replacement, $content);
    }
    
    return $content;
}

// Example usage
$content = '[bold]This is a [italic]custom markup[/italic] example[/bold]. Check out this [link=https://www.example.com]link[/link].';
echo parse_custom_markup($content);