Category description character limit

Hi,

Can anyone suggest how to increase the characters allowed in the category product description?

I have a lot of html that I need to include which are part of a jquery tabbed box, however when I put the entire code into the category description it cuts half of it out.

I have tried to include it in a separate php file and used the following in the category description box ```php

If it's the same on all categories, then why don't you put it into your template, since that's where non-category-specific HTML belongs.

Its not the same in each category as I am looking to list all my product prices with add to cart for each category in this tabbed box to avoid the product info display pages.

You do realize that hard-coding that product-info completely removes all kinds of flexibility from both you and your shoppers, right?
You'll no longer be able to easily put products on sale, turn on specials, allow customers to sort on price or name or something else, view related products, etc etc etc.

DrByte:

You do realize that hard-coding that product-info completely removes all kinds of flexibility from both you and your shoppers, right?
You'll no longer be able to easily put products on sale, turn on specials, allow customers to sort on price or name or something else, view related products, etc etc etc.

I know and its a real pain hard coding this, however for the life of me I can never get the product info display page to sit how I want it, and also with the site being an online printers, I have had to separate 1-sided printing and 2-sided printing into separate sub-categories because of the non-support for dependent attributes.

This has put a lot of people off from purchasing as all the prices are not easily viewed from one section...for example if they wanted A3 Posters they would have to click on sub-category A3 Posters Printed 1-side for paper types, quantities and prices, then click on the other sub-category for the Printed 2-sided paper types, quantities and prices. And are not able to compare prices with the ease that this tabbed box will give. :yuck:

DrByte:

You do realize that hard-coding that product-info completely removes all kinds of flexibility from both you and your shoppers, right?
You'll no longer be able to easily put products on sale, turn on specials, allow customers to sort on price or name or something else, view related products, etc etc etc.

Can you help?

If I make extra html define pages in place of my categories and use the tabbed box and bypass not only the product info display but categories also, would I have any other problems (e.g. Sessions), apart from those flexibility problems mentioned by dr byte?

I understand that flexibility with easy to add specials etc is inconvenient, but these changes would be more practical for my customers.

Sounds like for a properly optimal solution you need some custom coding for your unique needs.

But, if the bandage you posted about above is all you want, simply change the field length in the categories_description table in the database.

Thanks for your help. The bandage will have to do for now. I'll give it a go.

Hi,

I'm having a similar problem, trying to paste some code into a Category Description and having it get cut off.

My first instinct was to increase character limit via phpMyAdmin, but I can't see how to do that!

I'm posting a screen shot. Can someone tell me what I should change?

The TEXT field is allowed to contain 65,535 characters. That's quite a lot of info, especially for a category description.
If you want to allow up to 16,777,215 instead, change it to be MEDIUMTEXT instead. It will of course cause the database to take up more space.

Thanks, DrByte!

In this particular case I am using the Category pages to post a monthly newsletter, articles are "Products". Probably should have worked harder to encourage the client to use wordpress since this is not even an ecommerce site. However, they will be wanting to put up some ecommerce sites and they wanted the look to stay consistent. When they are ready for that project, I will duplicate the site onto a new domain and begin using Zen correctly. :)

Anyway, they are using iContact to create/send newsletters. The newsletters are slick, done by a pro. Problem is that iContact adds tons of code gobblety gook for tracking purposes.

You said:

The TEXT field is allowed to contain 65,535 characters. That's quite a lot of info, especially for a category description.
If you want to allow up to 16,777,215 instead, change it to be MEDIUMTEXT instead. It will of course cause the database to take up more space.

Going to 16m from 65k is a huge leap! I think 130k would more than do the trick. Should I try doing that instead of bumping all the way up to 16m? Can you suggest a way to do that? I don't want to gobble up huge resources unnecessarily and slow the site.

Thanks,
Mike

Since it's only for categories, if you don't add thousands of categories then the space requirements won't be a huge issue. It does try to take up only as much as it needs.

Excellent info as always, DrByte. I did as suggested, worked like a charm.

We have a category that we are using HTML to display the information. We have apparently hit the limit and our HTML is being cut off. I have tried setting the TYPE in the database to MEDIUMTEXT and LONGTEXT and have had no luck in correcting this. When I go in to look at the database, it shows all the HTML code is there, it's just not displaying all of it in the shopping cart. Any help is appreciated!!!

Link to Category:
http://www.thegoodlifestore.com/store/index.php?main_page=index&cPath=548

Where to start? It's almost impossible to see the forest for the trees. HTML not appearing correctly could be a result of any of the > 278 Errors, 489 warning(s)reported by W3C validation services. Looks like a lot of work just to get the forest taken care of before you can really find the problem.:(

Needs a lot of work. Unfortunately, that's not uncommon for store-bought.

Additionally --
The site is not mobile ready, the keywords contain 4,369 Characters:shocking:, and the meta tag description is only 11 characters less.

Unfortunately, I am not well versed in php coding or web design in general. I pretty much just know enough to be dangerous. :(