Textpattern tips, tutorials and code snippets

Increase the textarea sizes in your Admin

Love editing code in textpattern? Wish you had more room to write your code?

If so, use the code below to increase the size of your textareas by editing your default texpattern 4.2.0 CSS file located in: /textpattern/theme/classic/textpattern.css

Copy the CSS below and paste it at the end of the textpattern.css and hit save.

#page-page tr td.column:nth-of-type(2), #page-form #edit tr td:nth-of-type(2), #page-css #edit tr td:nth-of-type(2) {
	width: 80%;
}
textarea#html.code, textarea#form.code, textarea#css.code {
	width: 100%;
}

If you have another TXP admin theme enabled it may not work. Please also note that if you upgrade your Textpattern install your code will be overwritten.

5 Comments Comment feed

  • Joe Hastings
  • 8 December 2009

OR install and use Safari, (there is a Windows version) to edit code in the TXP Interface. All text fields are resizeable by default in that browser. In TXP the Article, Excerpt,Page, Field and CSS edit windows can be re-sized by dragging the bottom right corner.

Joe speaks my mind, but for those who must live in the browser ghetto where CSS is needed, I’d recommend creating an alternate Theme for this— that way upgrading Textpattern won’t overwrite your changes.

It’s surprisingly easy: create a textpattern.css file with only the rules you need to change (like the lines above). Create a theme manifest that refers back to the classic theme— something like this†:

<?php

if (!defined(‘txpinterface’)) die(‘txpinterface is undefined.’);

theme::based_on(‘classic’);

class MyCustom_theme extends classic_theme
{

function manifest() { return array( ‘title’ => ‘MyCustom’, ‘author’ => ‘J.K. Rowling’, ‘author_uri’ => ‘http://google.com/’, ‘version’ => ’0.1’, ‘description’ => ‘Posuere exer uptatem alisis incinim suscil vulput fringilla.’, ‘help’ => ‘’, ); }
}
?>

Save both files in a directory called MyCustom (or whatever you name the theme) under themes, and you’re ready to roll. Then, just activate the theme under Advanced Prefs.

† The comment input here strips out line breaks and tabs, but you can see plenty of example manifests at Textgarden for the canonical formating.

Joe, I use Safari and never need to resize textareas so I would agree that this is the simplest solution.

John, thanks for the excellent writeup. This tip has been published “as-is” and I was hopeful that others would chip in with some further options.

May I ask that you write a tutorial on creating an admin theme based on your comment above? I think that would be very helpful and we have not yet touched much on the new 4.2 features.

Firefox add-on > Resizeable Textarea

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