No editor plain text for Blog entries

We have the Joomla editor disabled for all but admins on our site. I am trying to get CB Blogs set up but a user can only enter a title. The Blog text input box is not active--you cannot click inside the box to enter text. If I login as an admin, where the editor is enabled, I am able to create a blog post with the ability to type text into all text boxes. Is there a way to use the CB Blogs function without allowing use of a text editor?

Looks like it's trying to load Joomlas editor and it can't. How are you disabling the editor for everyone else? The best way to handle only admins having editor usage is to set "Default Editor" in Joomla global configuration to "Editor - None" then edit your admin users in CB > User Management and set their "Editor" field to whatever editor you want assigned to them. If you've "Default Editor" set to "Editor - TinyMCE" then you've set "Editor - TinyMCE" access in Extensions > Plugins it'll likely just cause a broken editor to load as it doesn't fall back to "Editor - None" in that case.

I was going to implement your suggestions for editor settings but it seems that mysteriously it is now working properly without my doing anything...

Very strange. Sounds like it was maybe just a caching problem then.

Not sure why, but the blog content text box is once again unselectable/unwriteable. I have modified the Global Configuration settings as you recommended (default editor = none, set the editor in superuser profiles to JCE). Now it is working as needed.

Is there some way to disable the tool tips on the page for entering a new blog post? We don't need them and they are confusing to the user given that they can only use plain text format for their posts.

Also, there is now a Read More button next to the box where we type in the blog contents. If the user accidentally clicks it, it sends them to the home page of the site and they lose whatever they may have typed but wasn't saved yet. Is it supposed to do that? Any way to hide this weird button/menu as well? I went through all 3 Blog mode settings and they all exhibit this Read More button.

Is there some way to disable the tool tips on the page for entering a new blog post? We don't need them and they are confusing to the user given that they can only use plain text format for their posts.

Only way to remove them is to use language overrides shown below to translate them to empty string. That should suppress them.

www.joomlapolis.com/blog/kyle/18701-language-overrides-have-arrived

Also, there is now a Read More button next to the box where we type in the blog contents. If the user accidentally clicks it, it sends them to the home page of the site and they lose whatever they may have typed but wasn't saved yet. Is it supposed to do that? Any way to hide this weird button/menu as well? I went through all 3 Blog mode settings and they all exhibit this Read More button.

That's the editor plugin "Button - Readmore" in Extensions > Plugins. We do not apply any special alterations to Joomlas editor. We just call their API to render it. So any configuration pertaining to the editor is entirely in Joomla. To limit access to that button or hide it entirely you'll need to adjust the access of "Button - Readmore" or unpublish it.

I'm not sure why you don't want to give your users some easy editing features however. You can edit "Editor - TinyMCE" in Extensions > Plugins to give your users a reduced capability version of TinyMCE so they can use some of the basic features like bold, italic, etc..