Increase length of record field?

maximan,

Are you using a “text area” field for this? That should give you 65,000 characters. You can also edit the database directly in PHPMyAdmin. Find the field you want to add more space to and change the “type” to “LONGTEXT” that will give you enough to put in a whole novel.

The issue is not the number of characters a field is capable of holding nor the display once data has been entered. Rather, my question is how to increase the size of the data entry box which currently doesn’t allow more than a few words to be shown.

On a related issue, is it possible to limit the width of columns by field. Also, I’d like to limit the number of lines displayed. I tried this but it failed to work. Any hints?

.pdb-list .textarea {
display:block;
width: 200px;
height: 100px;
overflow:auto;
}

maximan,

Have you looked at the CSS that defines the size of the input element? You can set the size of the element by overriding that CSS in your own CSS rule.

This is probably what’s happening with your text area as well. CSS will set the size, but if your rule is not overriding the rule that’s active, it won’t affect the size.

That’s easier said than done, at least in my case. Even though I’ve read CSS tutorials and have basic HTML knowledge I can’t figure out where to find the appropriate prefix code, e.g. “.wp-list-table th ” in the example below:

.wp-list-table th {
background-color: #f5f5f5;
}

In the example above I copied the code from one of your forum posters and overrode the theme CSS using a custom style sheet. My question is where does the average user find the appropriate prefix code. How is this different from, say, “.pdb-list .textarea “. Regarding your suggestion, I used Firebug to try and identify the element but despite experimentation was unsuccessful. This is not my forte – Very frustrating! Is there a link you can reference where I can learn more about the prefix code?

maximan,

What you’re talking about is called a “selector” and what it does is specify the element you want to apply a rule to. The way CSS works is that more specific rules will override less specific ones. (there’s more to it than that, but lets just focus on that) So, if you click on the element that you want to style in FireBug and it shows that your width is set with a selector of ‘.wp-list-table th’ you can probably override it by adding the class of an element that encloses it…in other words up the hierarchy. So, something like ‘.pdb-list .wp-list-table th’ which makes the selector more specific because it’s only going to affect those elements that are inside an element with a class of ‘pdb-list’

Try it and see if that works.

Getting there – slowly! Thanks for your patience.