Is it possible to Incorporate Markdown in your Laravel App?

I'd love to add a little richness to what can be done in the posts for my forum website. For instance, I know in reddit you can do simple things like bold or italicize words, or with github you can make hypertext with this format hyperlinked text.

It would be great to allow hypertext for inserting images mid-post, which I think would serve great for story-telling.

What I most want to do though is provide a short-hand for hyperlinking like the github example I provide, but only allow links to webpages on my site, so perhaps they can reference/link one post in another post. I figure white-listing to only provide references to my own site (and perhaps only allowing GET routes) would make it safer than letting users go gun-ho with putting whatever link they want in the markdown.

Any suggestions? Any security concerns to consider? Thanks!