Tables in Wordpress?

• 2008
  April 8th
• Comments
  1
• Filed in
  development
• Tagged
  plugins, tables, wordpress

My co-workers and I were talking about Content Management Systems today and the conversation focused mainly on the fact that they were frustrated with how difficult it is to develop for Drupal.  We’ve had this discussion many times over and WordPress gets brought up most of the time comparing it to Drupal and to the other CMS we use, Adobe Contribute.

There are a few problems with WordPress when it comes to using it as a development platform for our clients:

• the lack of customization on a page level - adding different things in the sidebar for specific pages
• page management - how easy is WordPress to use when you have 150 pages in it?
• the lack of html table controls in the wysiwyg

The first two are still unknowns, but if you have any info that I can use, please leave a comment and I’ll be in touch.  The last one, the lack of html table controls in the wysiwyg, has always been a problem as well but I took about 3 hours today and finally found two methods of getting html table controls into WordPress.

The first, Alex Rabe’s wp-table plugin is actually a pretty nice plugin and while it doesn’t add table controls to the wysiwyg, it gives you a separate area under “Manage” to create, import and edit tables and lets you call the table in any page or post by adding the tag “[TABLE=id]” where id is the id of the table.  This would be really good for data tables and tables where no images are needed but in terms of a table control that a client could use to separate content from an image or any other need, this doesn’t really cut it.

The second method, which I found on hm2k.com is actually modifying WordPress’ default TinyCME install.  TinyCME does support tables and has table controls available via a plugin - you just need to have that plugin installed and included in the tinymce configuration file.  The result is table controls that are built right into WordPress’ wysiwyg and because they’re from TinyCME and pretty standard, any client - once they’re shown the new buttons - could use them to create any layout they want.