For my current project, I needed a more robust character count that was was out there, so I started by looking at what Andrew Weaver had done with his, and came up with this offering.

MD Character Count will show character counts below textareas, text inputs, and MD Markitup fields in the CP. You can set character counts to “soft” (which is the default) which is more of a suggestion, or “hard” which will limit the field to that many characters and no more. You can also customize the message underneath each field.

You can download it from the MD Character Count page at Masuga Design.

Hi Ryan,

Will post here as well as your site to say this is an excellent little extension well done and thanks for sharing it!!

Just one thing though I couldn’t seem to get this to work unless I enabled the jQuery For Control Panel extension. I thought from reading the documentation that it should work without it but couldn’t seem to get it to work like that. Works great though with the other extension on so thanks.

Best wishes,

Mark

This is really great. Just a feature request: it would be great if there was an option to count words instead of characters. I know I could use the word counter.

@Mark: I would suggest always turning on the CP jQuery extension. If other extensions are written to look for this, it will help avoid conflicts.

This extension should definitely work without having to install CP jQuery, but it might not depending on whether you have other extensions installed that are also calling jQuery. If those others are older and not set up to look for other extensions also calling jQuery (like this one), sometimes jQuery can be loaded more than once in the head which can cause some extensions to fail. I’ve seen some of Leevi’s extensions fail because of this too (LG Data Matrix, in my testing). That’s the sort of the thing the CP jQuery extension was intended to help address.

@Rob: Word count would be nice, sure. And so would being able to ignore HTML. I’m not married to the jQuery plugin I’m using - it seemed lightweight, but I did have to modify it to allow for soft counts. If there is a better character/word counting jQuery extension out there, point me to it and maybe I can beef this up with some extra settings.

Hi Ryan,

Ah right. Could possibly be another extension then although to tell the truth I don’t think any of the other extensions I have on the site use jQuery. Could be wrong on that though.

Anyway will just go with using the jQuery extension as that is much neater anyway.

Again thanks for a fantastic extension, really nice this one!!

Best wishes,

Mark

I know your specs state that the plugin is MSM aware,

however when I change from site to site I get an error in my page above all HTML :

Where index 2 is the index of the site.

I used both the custom path for jquery, and when I encountered the problem the CP jquery extention. But that made no difference.

Any idea what can cause this? Thank you.

Let’s make sure we’re on the same page. What version/build of EE are you using, and are you using PHP 4 or 5?

I am using EE 1.6.6 and
PHP Version 5.2.6-5
Version 1.0.4 of your extention

I’m setting up an MSM installation locally to test this and MD Live Search. Seems a few of my add-ons are having issues with their MSM abilities. Arrrgh.

Here’s a jQuery word count plugin I found. I need it for a SAEF, but might have something useful for the extension.

Cool. I think it would be a good thing to specify whether you want words or characters counted on each field. The other nice thing would be to ignore HTML tags.

Ryan, any progress with the MSM undefined index errors? I am seeing the same errors when switching between sites:

Notice: Undefined index: 1 in /[path]/extensions/ext.md_character_count.php on line 96

I haven’t fixed that. I think the only thing you need to do is go into the MDCC settings for that site and hit “Submit” once and that error should go away.

I would get on this, but I think the above will solve the issue for each site for now, and I have a certain EE-related site I’m trying to get launched as soon as possible. It’s on my to-do list, though.

I’m seeing notices as well and If it would help I’ve attached a dump from xdebug of the notices I’m seeing.

I’m almost 100% positive this has to do with the settings not getting set by default - hence having to hit “Submit” to get the settings in there. With a launch of devot:ee coming very soon I just don’t have time to get on this immediately. It’s still on my to-get-to list.

Thanks for posting the notices.

That fixed it for me Ryan. Thanks a lot.

Just wanted to say thanks for this extension - works perfectly. Cheers!

Hey Ryan, any chance this could be made to work on the title field as well in the future?

In case anyone gets a similar problem, I was getting this error when trying to save the settings:

Notice: Undefined index: field_defaults in / ...path to… /extensions/ext.md_character_count.php on line 443

And a few other errors - the settings were still saved though.  As this was the first time I’d used the extension, I hadn’t realised that there were parts missing from the settings page.  Line 443 refers to $_POST[‘field_defaults’], which didn’t exist, hence the error crashing the Control Panel.

Adding:

before the foreach line (443) removed the error.

The reason it was occuring was that I’d tried to access the extension too early!  Although I had some weblogs, I hadn’t set up any fields yet, and the extension doesn’t check for this.

What would be handy is adding the above if statement to the extension code to prevent the error appearing and when loading the settings page, display a message if no appropriate text fields were found in the weblogs informing the user.