Unformatted Textarea with Very Basic Text Styling

Question

What's the best way to have an unformatted textarea field (meaning no <p> or <br> tags), but still allow the client to make text bold, italic, or add a link?

I often have to put content into a specific element (<p class="summary">, for example), so it can't be wrapped in its own <p> tags. And often for styling purposes the content can't have line breaks. But the content can still have bold or italic text or contain a link. Example:

This is an example of some summary text. Text can be bold, or it can be emphasized, and it can even contain a link because these are all inline changes that don't affect layout.

Is there any client-friendly way (read: no html tags) to accomplish this?

Answer 1

Couple of suggestions:

• have you looked into using Textile or Markdown for your textarea?
• use a div.summary instead of a p
• CE String has methods to strip out tags from html, check remove_tags or remove_tags_except (I use this a lot personally - lots of other useful methods too in this plugin)
• Wygwam has a text-only mode that can be useful.

Answer 2

You could use the built-in html formatting buttons in EE, which can be enabled on a Textarea field. This would meet your requirement of no br or p tags without the need of a plugin to strip them out.

When the user clicks a formatting button the correct html is applied automatically, but it does leave the tags exposed (not a wysiwyg).