Emacs org-mode markdown export: #+TITLE option not exported

I use the great org-mode to easily push modifications of README.md to GitHub projects. Markdown export works great, except for the #+TITLE option not being exported to Markdown - which works flawlessly for HTML export.

I want to keep the file name README.org for convenient converting to Markdown, else I could have chosen the title as file name, which displays the title correctly on GitHub.

Any suggestions on how to achieve this?

Based on your question and subsequent comments, you seem to want to achieve three things:

1. Define a custom title that gets exported as a top-level headline.

2. Insert the TOC after the title.

3. The TOC should not include the title.

---

Custom location for TOC

Inserting the TOC at a custom location is easy, so let's start with that: Add

#+OPTIONS: toc:nil

to the export options at the top of README.org. By itself, this tells org-mode not to include the default TOC when exporting. You can then place the TOC where you want it to go by inserting

#+TOC: headlines

at the desired location. (This method is not specific to Markdown export.)

---

Custom title that doesn't show up in TOC

Defining a custom title that is not included in the TOC is a bit trickier, but the basic idea is to exclude the title from the TOC by formatting it as a Markdown headline instead of an org headline. As a first step, change README.org to look like this:

#+OPTIONS: toc:nil

# Emacs als Python-Power-Editor für den RasPi

#+TOC: headlines

* Wieso nur ausgerechnet Emacs???
...

Out of the box this won't yield the desired results because org will interpret the title as a comment and by default the Markdown exporter is configured to ignore comments. However, in order to change the default behavior you can

1. define a custom transcoder for comments in your .emacs:

   (defun org-md-comment (comment contents info)
     "Transcode COMMENT object into Markdown format.
   CONTENTS is nil.  INFO is a plist holding contextual information."
     (format "# %s" (org-element-property :value comment)))
   

2. redefine the Markdown export backend to make use of this transcoder:

   (org-export-define-derived-backend 'md 'html
     ;; ...
     :translate-alist '((bold . org-md-bold)
                        (code . org-md-verbatim)
                        (comment . org-md-comment) ;; <--- Use custom transcoder
                        (comment-block . (lambda (&rest args) ""))
                        ;; ...
                        ))
   

   The original definition of the backend can be found in the file ox-md.el; this file is located in the directory of your org-mode installation. You'll need to copy the full definition to your .emacs file and change the line

   (comment . (lambda (&rest args) ""))
   

   as shown above.

---

Results

With these customizations the resulting README.md file looks like this:

# Emacs als Python-Power-Editor für den RasPi

<div id="table-of-contents">
<h2>Table of Contents</h2>
<div id="text-table-of-contents">
<ul>
<li><a href="#sec-1">1. Wieso nur ausgerechnet Emacs???</a></li>
<li><a href="#sec-2">2. Die Maus ist tot, es leben die shortcuts!</a></li>
<li><a href="#sec-3">3. Auf den Emacs, fertig, los!</a></li>
</ul>
</div>
</div>

# Wieso nur ausgerechnet Emacs???
...