changing the length restriction of an alternate text

**bertand** · 10/17/2011, 21:28

Hello

When using an image as content element I would like to put some description in the alternate text line,which will show up when you click the image for a full view (mediabox). But the length of this description is limited. Can you change this, so I can put in more textlines?
Does anyone has experience with this?

Bert

**Medianomaly** · 10/17/2011, 23:46

Exercise caution with this. I think the ALT tag has a limit to the amount of characters because there's a certain point where Google thinks you are keyword stuffing.

That said stuff these lines of code somewhere (the best place is /system/config/dcaconfig.php).

Code:

// This defaults to 255 so if you want to make longer...
$GLOBALS['TL_DCA']['tl_content']['fields']['alt']['eval']['maxlength'] = 511;

// If you want to make it multiline...
$GLOBALS['TL_DCA']['tl_content']['fields']['alt']['inputType'] = 'textarea';

// And without this the text area gets a bit long for your needs...
$GLOBALS['TL_DCA']['tl_content']['fields']['alt']['eval']['style'] = 'height: 60px;';

It's probably more "proper" to instead use the caption field. If you enter your text into that, you can copy the "ce_image.tpl" template from "/system/modules/frontend/templates/" into your theme's templates folder.

Then you can customize it by changing...

Code:

<a href="<?php echo $this->href; ?>"<?php echo $this->attributes; ?> title="<?php echo $this->alt; ?>">

to...

Code:

<a href="<?php echo $this->href; ?>"<?php echo $this->attributes; ?> title="<?php echo $this->caption; ?>">

And if you don't want a caption below the actual image, remove this...

Code:

<?php if ($this->caption): ?>
<div class="caption"><?php echo $this->caption; ?></div>
<?php endif; ?>

And that, in a nutshell, is an example of what rules about Contao...

**ramjet** · 10/18/2011, 02:48

Nice Tutorial

**bertand** · 10/18/2011, 09:01

I can put a longer text in the textarea, but when I save it still cuts of automatically at 255 characters?

$GLOBALS['TL_DCA']['tl_content']['fields']['caption']['eval']['maxlength'] = 511;
?>

**Medianomaly** · 10/18/2011, 16:41

Oh... I bet it's the database (the column is set to 255).

Still fixable, tiny bit more work.

If someone else doesn't get to it first, I can show you how to fix that later (busy day at work today).

**Medianomaly** · 10/19/2011, 04:44

Scrap all that -- you can put your code in a simple custom module folder...

You'll need to create these 2 files. "z-custom-alt-tags" can be anything. The 'z' in front ensures it's loaded last (and isn't overridden by another module later on).

1. /system/modules/z-custom-alt-tags/config/database.sql
If you look in '/system/modules/backend/database.sql', you'll see the 'caption' field in the database is set to 255. So you're going to overwrite it here by putting this:

Code:

CREATE TABLE `tl_content` (
  `caption` varchar(511) NOT NULL default ''
) ENGINE=MyISAM DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8;

2. /system/modules/z-custom-alt-tags/dca/tl_content.php
You can put those 3 lines I gave you earlier in here instead.

Code:

$GLOBALS['TL_DCA']['tl_content']['fields']['caption']['eval']['maxlength'] = 511;
$GLOBALS['TL_DCA']['tl_content']['fields']['caption']['inputType'] = 'textarea';
$GLOBALS['TL_DCA']['tl_content']['fields']['caption']['eval']['style'] = 'height: 60px;';

Then make those template changes if needed.

So try that out. This is actually better because you have everything organized into one place.