Text Area

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• Description
• Screenshots
• Changelog
• Settings
• Template usage
• Display value with paragraphs automatically added
• Display value without formatting

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Description

The Text Area field creates a basic textarea input, useful to store simple (i.e., unstyled) paragraphs of text to use in your theme.

Screenshots

Creating a Text Area field in ACF.

The Presentation tab controls how the field will display.

How the Text Area field appears when editing content. You can see how changes made on the Presentation tab are reflected here.

Changelog

• Formatting setting removed in version 5.0.0.
• Rows setting added in 4.3.5.

Settings

• Default Value
  The default value shown when creating a new post.
• Required
  Found on the Validation tab, this prevents the field from accepting empty values. Defaults to off.
• Character Limit
  Limits the number of characters allowed.
• Instructions
  Shows instructions when submitting data.
• Rows
  Sets the height of this field. Defaults to 8.
• Placeholder Text
  Appears within input when no value exists.
• New Lines
  Changes the way new lines are formatted. Selecting “Automatically add paragraphs” will add paragraph tags around the value. Selecting “Automatically add <br>” will convert any new lines to HTML line breaks. Selecting “No Formatting” will not convert any tags, and you will see any HTML displayed as normal text similar to regular content.

Template usage

Display value with paragraphs automatically added

This example demonstrates how to display a Text Area field named product_description when the “Automatically add paragraphs” setting is enabled.

<h3>Product Description</h3>
<?php echo wp_kses_post ( get_field('product_description') ); ?>

Display value without formatting

This example demonstrates how to display a Text Area field named product_description when the “No Formatting” setting is enabled. In this case, we have to indicate a paragraph manually with the <p> tag.

<h3>Product Description</h3>
<p><?php echo wp_kses_post ( get_field('product_description') ); ?></p>