As a minimum, I suggest create a posts table and use comma separated fields for tags and categories, and blob for the content, and offcourse the datetime, slug and anything else specific to your site.

I mostly agree with @rashidshafique above, but I would suggest a text column.

As for markdown, looks like someone has already written a service provider to 4.x:

• http://registry.autopergamene.eu/package/kindari-laravel-markdown

You should be able to composer install that and have access to it in your controllers / views where needed.

much appreciated for the response's. Could you elaborate on the "table and use comma separated fields for tags and categories" i was thinking of a separate tags table with a relationship?

I would separate it out and create a 1 to many relationship between posts and categories and a many to many relationship between posts and tags. So you would end up with 4 tables: posts, categories, tags and post_tags.

Check out: http://laravel.com/docs/eloquent#relationships - (note the post_tags linker table is by default derived from the posts model and the tags model in alphabetical order).

http://packalyst.com has some markdown packages.