Convert textarea to writer field

The CMS Questions
1

Hello,

I need to update a website with a lot of text content that contains fields with textarea that I would like to convert to writer. When I change my .yml, the text in the panel changes its layout, as well as the layout on my template which was previously called with <?= $page->text()->footnotes() ?>. The second difficulty is also knowing how to retrieve the footnotes with “writer” and a call like <?= $page->text() ?> without losing the layout.

Do you have any guidance?

Capture d’écran 2025-02-15 à 18.11.27
Capture d’écran 2025-02-15 à 18.11.271000×605 49.9 KB

→ with textarea

Capture d’écran 2025-02-15 à 18.11.42
Capture d’écran 2025-02-15 à 18.11.42999×408 44.7 KB

→ with writer

2

The writer field stores its content as HTML while the textarea stores it as markdown. Which is why you see that after the change, the writer respects the HTML <br> you had added, but doesn’t know about the paragraphs (as they are just whitespace in HTML instead of wrapped by <p> </p>).

One way to go about it could be to loop through all the affected pages and update the field content with the HTML version of the markdown, e.g. something like

foreach ($pages as $page) {
  $page->update([
    'text' => $page->text()->kirbytext()
  ]);
}

However, footnotes might be a bit of a blocker for you as there is not directly any equivalent in the writer field. You would probably have to create a custom inline writer node that handles the representation of the footnote in the writer field and then a custom field method which goes through the field content, collects all footnotes and adds the necessary HTML list to the end of the text (that part could probably be similar to what the footnotes plugin for textarea does as well).