Plain Text Fields
Plain Text fields give you either a normal text input or a multi-line textarea, where plain text can be entered. How that text is used is entirely up to you!
# Settings
Plain Text fields have the following settings:
- UI Mode — How the field should be presented in the control panel. (Defaults to “Normal”, can be “Enlarged”.)
- Placeholder Text — The field’s placeholder text, to be displayed if the field has no value yet.
- Field Limit — The maximum number of characters or bytes the field is allowed to have. (Accepts a number and a unit, which defaults to “Characters” with another option for “Bytes”.)
- Use a monospaced font — Whether field input’s text will use a monospaced font.
- Allow line breaks — Whether to allow line breaks in this field.
- Initial Rows — For multi-line inputs, choose how many lines of text fit in the field, initially. This setting does not affect how many lines of text can be stored.
# The Field
Plain Text fields will either show a normal text input element or a multi-line textarea, depending on whether Allow line breaks was checked. To give editors more space, increase the number of Initial Rows.
# Development
Accessing a Plain Text field in your templates will return the value that was entered in the field. Suppose our field was named “Summary” and had a handle of summary:
{{ entry.summary }}
# Testing for a Value
An empty text field is a “falsey” value, so you can use it in a conditional:
{% if entry.summary %}
<h3>Summary</h3>
<p>{{ entry.summary }}</p>
{% endif %}
Keep in mind that whitespace characters count the same as any other character—use the trim filter to remove spaces and newlines from the beginning and end:
{% if entry.summary|trim %}
{# Ok, there really is content in here! #}
<h3>Summary</h3>
<p>{{ entry.summary }}</p>
{% endif %}
# Processing Text
Craft’s Twig environment has a ton of useful text processing features.
# Markdown
Parse a field’s value as Markdown with the markdown or md filter:
{% if entry.summary %}
<h3>Summary</h3>
{{ entry.summary|md }}
{% endif %}
Note that we’re not manually wrapping the output in <p></p> tags! Markdown takes care of this for us, unless you pass the inlineOnly argument:
<h3>{{ entry.stylizedHeader|md(inlineOnly = true) }}</h3>
# Reference Tags
To include dynamic information in a Plain Text field, you can copy reference tags from other elements, then use the parseRefs filter to render their values: