Thread

Normally, I would be delighted that Expression Engine automatically inserts ALT tags when images lack them.  However, I have a special instance where I am exporting XML code that should not have extraneous ALT tags. This is a special instance involving Monoslideshow integration.

I created a custom textarea field and set “Default Text Formatting for This Field” to “none”.  I hoped that this would disable any reformatting of my code within this custom field.

In this custom field I am creating a list of IMG tags according to Monoslideshow’s XML spec. Monoslideshow seems to spawn an error when ALT tags are included. This is lame, I know. Is there any way I can prevent EE from automatically inserting these parameters?

All in all, Expression Engine has been great to work with. Thanks!

pwenzel:

You have some per weblog settings that are ‘all or nothing.’  To turn this off, go to: 

CP Home ›  Admin ›  Weblog Administration ›  Weblog Management ›  Edit Weblog ›  Weblog Posting Preferences

and set Automatically turn URLs and email addresses into links? to “No”

Regards,

-greg

Thanks greg! I changed the setting to “No”, but the ALT tags continue to appear.  I tried deleting and re-creating the custom field and checked that caching is disabled. Is there anything else I should be checking?

In the meantime, I am going to use Mark Huot’s “File” addon, which seems to output the code I am looking for. It’ll do the trick just fine for now.

Could it perhaps be :

Admin->Weblog Administration->File Upload Preferences->(Your Upload Folder Name)->Image Properties

In there you will usually find the following in the default set anyway :

style="border: 0;" alt="image"

Is it that perhaps?

Best wishes,

Mark

If you look in the custom field after you have published and then gone back to edit it, what’s actually showing as the contents there?

Oops just re-read the first post again and I may have mis-understood. I thought perhaps you were inserting the file tags using the standard ExpressionEngine upload tool. If that’s the case then what I posted may be correct but if you are just typing in the links then there’s no way that ExpressionEngine should change any fields data to show anything other than what you type in it.

Hope you get this sorted soon.

Best wishes,

Mark

@Mark:

The Image Properties option noted above is in fact blank. Thanks for the suggestion, though.

@Robin:

The code in the textarea field was literally image tags and nothing else, followed by a line break:

<a href="http://www.myserver.com/path/to/image1.jpg">http://www.myserver.com/path/to/image1.jpg</a>
<a href="http://www.myserver.com/path/to/image2.jpg">http://www.myserver.com/path/to/image2.jpg</a>
<a href="http://www.myserver.com/path/to/image3.jpg">http://www.myserver.com/path/to/image3.jpg</a>

When it shows up in my monoslideshow xml, the images are altered like this:

<a href="http://www.myserver.com/path/to/image1.jpg">http://www.myserver.com/path/to/image1.jpg</a>
<a href="http://www.myserver.com/path/to/image2.jpg">http://www.myserver.com/path/to/image2.jpg</a>
<a href="http://www.myserver.com/path/to/image3.jpg">http://www.myserver.com/path/to/image3.jpg</a>

This is all happening on my test installation. When I launch my live site, I’ll start with a clean slate (and no additional plugins or extensions), and see what happens. In the meantime, I have replaced this custom textarea field Mark Huot’s “File” add-on. While this has some trade-offs, it gets the job done. Thanks for your help!

EDIT - Also as Robin suggested once you have posted the data into the field and saved the entry, when you then go back and edit the post is it still the same in the field or has it changed?

Just out of interest you say that you were creating an XML file using the data? Just wondering how you were doing that as that may have had something to do with this?

If you are typing in literal text to a custom field then ExpressionEngine shouldn’t really ever touch that data it should show as whatever you input. Maybe something a little funny with the conversion to XML data perhaps?

Glad you have it working now but would be nice to know what caused the problem though.

Best wishes,

Mark

pwenzel:

I wanted to check to see that with your tweaks, you are up and running now?

-greg

pwenzel: any other feedback?