How can I increase the maximum length of article titles?

Question

I need to create a few articles with very long titles, but it seems like Joomla has a maximum article title length of around 256. How can I increase this limit?

Answer 1

After reading the comments under your question:

You could modify the #__content.title column but bear in mind that this involves a potential risk of data lοss if a future Joomla update contains database alterations for that table. Generally modifying in this way the core is not a recommended practice.

The title column could be changed with a MySQL statement like the following:

ALTER TABLE `jos_content` CHANGE `title` `title` VARCHAR(500) CHARACTER SET utf8mb4 COLLATE utf8mb4_unicode_ci NOT NULL DEFAULT '';

_{* Replace the jos_ prefix with your current one.}

This is also easily changeable through the GUI of PHPMyAdmin.

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However, the above should be your last option and you it would be best to try and come out with other ways to achieve the desired result, depending on the use case.

For example, you could use the com_fields to add extra custom fields for the article title. Something like short title and long title, or take advantage of the read-more (intro-text) of Joomla Articles.

If you could give more details about the format of the articles titles and the purpose this format will serve, we might be able to offer more creative ideas.

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Update:

For anyone that might arrive here, seeking for the same, @Dan created a new Q/A answer, as a response to my comment below:

@Dan - I am not 100% clear of what you want. Do you want instead of the actual article title, to display a summary of the article that will be the link to the article? Have you tried to use the intro-text feature to display a short introduction below the article title? Can you present visually your ideal result?

The new Q/A is: How can I create a page that links to all articles with fake long titles?
There @DennisHeiden provides an answer on how to use the read-more (intro-text) feature to achieve this.