The default field length for Manufacturer Name in Zen Cart is 64 characters.  In some cases this may not be enough and today we are going to step through increasing this field to support longer names.

As this is not a setting in Zen Cart Admin, we will need to make the change directly in the relevant database tables.  In this example we will be using cPanel and phpMyAdmin.

1. Log in to your cPanel Control Panel
   

   Your cPanel is located at either http://YourSitesIPAddress/cpanel (for example, http://1.2.3.4/cpanel), or http://www.yourdomainname.com/cpanel or http://cpanel.yourdomainname.com/.

   Your cPanel username and password will generally be found in a welcome email from your webhost.

   Scroll down to the section Databases and click on phpMyAdmin.
   

2. Select the Zen Cart database from the menu on the left hand side of phpMyAdmin.
   

3. The Zen Cart database tables will now be displayed in the left hand side menu.  The first table that we need to modify is manufacturers or, with the prefix, zen_manufacturers.  Select this table. 
    

4. Select the Structure tab and then click on the Change icon (pencil) corresponding with manufacturers_name.
   

5. In the Length/Values field, change the value from 32 to the number of characters required.  In this case we are changing the field to accept up to 64 characters.

   Click the Save button to save your change.
    

6. A success message is displayed.
   

And that’s it.  You will now be able to enter manufacturer names up to the new number of characters you specified in the database.

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