Hello,
First time posting. Wondering how we can go about changing the bio length on a self hosted instance? 200 characters is awful short.
I seem to remember finding something way back about just changing the value in /current/core/server/data/schema/schema.js, but this doesn’t seem to be affecting any change.
thanks!
I definitely feel your pain here. In Ghost 1.0 we extended out the hard limits across many fields like bio, tag description etc. We kept the soft-limits in place in Ghost itself whilst we figured out exactly what a more sensible limit looks like for these fields and rework the UI to support more data.
Currently there’s no easy way to adjust these limits but if you’re on Ghost 1.0 you can either modify the code, and build your own version Ghost or put extra data directly in the database. The latter is much easier, but may result in validation errors when trying to use the UI.
Soft limits live in Ghost Admin and the server-side Schema.
Out of curiosity, what’s the use case here? What are you planning to do with the data in the field and how many characters do you think you’ll be looking to store? Real world use cases help to inform us on how these fields should work in future 
This topic was automatically closed 14 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.
Reopening the topic to see if there is a wide usecase for this change (would validate a need for this PR). Please upvote the idea and describe usecases that are blocked by the 200 character limit. This should help the team to decide if it’s worth dedicating time for the change.
This would definitely be beneficial for my usecase. Although things have been delayed due to pandemics and such, a publication I’ve migrated for a colleague of mine from Medium has dozens of writers, many of whom are academics and authors. I’m not sure how Medium’s bios work (I avoid that thing like the plague COVID-19), but I know that on many of the posts I’ve migrated over that several of these authors have added lengthy personal bios to the end of the post itself, consisting of mention of universities (and faculties) they teach at, books they’ve written, institutions they’re a part of, etc. I’d say that adding that stuff to the end of the post should be discouraged for various reasons (can’t be dynamically updated across all posts of a particular author, etc.), yet as things stand being able to add those comprehensive bios to a Ghost publication isn’t possible with a 200-character limit.
As a bonus, it’d be nice if HTML could be utilized (and not counted against the character count) as this would allow for linking to websites where an author’s book(s) could be found, etc. (which would be on top of the already-existing staff member website field).
Last of all, supposing the character count was raised, would it be possible to limit the amount of words used on certain pages (via something like {{content words="200"}})? For example, while one may want to display the entire 800-character (or whatever it be) bio on the authors page as well as on the pages of each individual author, due to some themes placing the author image and bio in a side-panel it might not work design-wise to cram lengthy bios in such spaces, which could instead implement the aforementioned {{content words="200"}} as well as a read more link.
p.s. I tried voting for this topic but my limit was already reached. I removed two of my votes, but curiously enough that didn’t free up any votes that I could dispense. I still have one voted topic in my list that is no longer in the Ideas category but rather is in the Themes category. If possible, perhaps my vote for that non-Ideas topic could be removed so I could vote for this topic?
I have run into the same problem, the use case being the need for multilanguage bio. My need is two languages and 400-500 characters. The current 200 limit required a lot of careful wordcraft, hence the 500 proposal.
Full multilanguage content support throughout Ghost would be a much better alternative, but that is a huge project.
Wish I could upvote, but the forum only allows me to use several votes and even if I remove my vote from an older post I still cannot vote… But I would also increase the number of characters to 400-500.
Would be great if someone could compile a list of references. Interested to see what limits are imposed for similar data on other platforms.
E.g.:
I just noticed that on this Crikey article, using WordPress, that the author’s bio is 270+ characters. Perhaps the max is in the 300 range? Or do different WP author plugins (supposing such things exist, I don’t know WP) allow for differing author bio character lengths, possibly even larger than 300?
As a side note, I notice that italics are used in the bio, which I believe aren’t possible with Ghost author bios.
I understand this limitation issue is low on the development totem pole – but for me, it is something that has required another workaround. I created a special Contributors page, and put everyone’s complete bio there, along with their profile pic. Then, in the 200-character bio slot, I put a sentence or two, then say (Read the rest on the Contributor page.) And of course, I can’t link to the Contributor page, since the bio slot doesn’t take HTML.
As I’ve noted before, my situation may be unique, in that I have a LARGE number of contributors, many of whom are accomplished in their fields. Longer bio space, plus a way to handle contributors without making them staff, are both on my short list of improvements I’d like to see.
Oh, and being able to include icons with links to multiple social media profiles and their personal web site would be good additions as well.
With the new Google helpful content update, E-A-T is becoming increasingly important. 200 characters are nowhere near enough to show authors have the expertise to cover the topics they write about
My magazine has a print version as well, and there we ask for “50ish words” for the author bio. We often end up having to trim down what people send in, due to being incredibly long, but the longest I’ve seen so far is 376 characters (they’re usually about 330 or less, but this was by a long-time author from before we started being more strict).
I guess in my context 400 characters would be safe? Or even 350 at a pinch (it’ll help us be strict too).
I conceptually support this too, but as a developer I also know that supporting HTML can open up a can of worms—imagine for instance if authors add a subheading or bulleted list in their bio which then gets rendered on every byline at the bottom of a post.
That said, links can be important, so how about supporting some minimal markdown, or even a formattable block with more limited options like those in Ghost email/callout cards? We could limit it to bold, italic, and links, for instance.
I’m a bit sceptical of automatic truncations, but perhaps (as a separate feature) we could have full-blown “About” pages for authors? Here, they could include rich text including lists, headings (maybe) and the like, which will show up before their article list. Then they could keep their bios short enough to fit in the design and enter their full credentials on the About page.
That said, {{content words=200}} would still be handy for some places in the theme where we’re actually truncating the author bio (maybe as part of a larger list of authors or a place in the theme where they’re only mentioned briefly?). Ideally we’d have both 
Is there any guide on how to pack a bundle from modified Ghost sources and then install it with ghost-cli? I searched a lot but found only this article about installing a local development copy of Ghost (for further contributing I suppose) and nothing about building my own version of Ghost. Thanks!
UPD: Looks like this comment might be of help.
See also on that thread:
We’ve just updated all our docs on this, to hopefully make it way way easier. Let us know if you have any problems 
I’d love to see the removal of this limit on tag description fields. This is the only thing holding us back from moving to Ghost.
I would love to see this being expanded. The current set-up is quite brief.
For now, I have created a separate page for the Author bio and redirected the tag/author page to it.
It would be great to have detailed author schema on the author page so that every blog page pulls that information automatically. This would greatly benefit SEO.
Currently working on this issue. Plan to make dedicated author pages and then redirect tags/author pages to it.
If anyone discovers a neat way to do this let us know!