Support » Plugin: TablePress - Tables in WordPress made easy » Musings on disabled previous/disabled links

  • Resolved Dominor Novus

    (@dominor-novus)


    One minor nuance that I’ve noticed is that when both the previous/next links are disabled (e.g. no other pages), the styling isn’t very intuitive. I found myself clicking the links and resultantly began to suspect that something was functionally wrong. I understand that you’ve used lighter colors to imply that the links are disabled but it’s ultimately confusing.

    My recommendations:

    1. For the condition when one of these links are disabled, set display to none for the disabled link.
    2. For the condition that two of these links are disabled, either set display to none or via PHP substitute in a “No other pages” message.
    3. Alternatively, though less desirable, for either of the above conditions, use much lighter colors for the arrow graphics and text styling and augment the cursor type (the standard cursor implies an expectation of action).
    4. For the overall design of the arrow graphics, considering the small size of the graphics, the shadow produces a blurry effect. For my own custom designed arrow graphics, I ommited the shadow and it produces a much sharper effect thats consistent with the sorting arrow graphics.

    These, of course, are just my opinions but worth sharing no less.

    Thank you for the fantastic plugin.

    http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/tablepress/

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)
  • Plugin Author TobiasBg

    (@tobiasbg)

    Hi,

    thanks for your great feedback, I really appreciate it!

    I agree that the styling for the previous/next links is not optimal. Unfortunately, I don’t have a lot of freedom here, as their behavior is defined by the DataTables JavaScript library that TablePress uses for this functionality. I can however change some of the styling, I’m planning to do that for the upcoming version 0.9-RC of TablePress.
    In fact, you can see these changes in action at http://tablepress.org/demo/ which already uses the current development version (if you want to use that, too, you can get it at http://tablepress.org/download/tablepress-dev.zip )
    The changes there include a new coloring, that better matches the rest of the TablePress styling. Previously, the images where more like purple, as they are in the original DataTables styling.
    Additionally, I changed the cursor type for the disabled links, which should help greatly with recognizing the functionality.

    Regarding your recommendations:

    1. Hiding these is possible via CSS, but I’m not sure I like that. This doesn’t look right to me, as suddenly links are appearing or can even jump on the page.
    2. This is not possible, unfortunately, as it would require changes in the JS of the DataTables library.
    3. Did that 🙂
    4. I’m not that much of a graphics designer, so I’m always happy about input here. Can I see your table with your custom arrow graphics somewhere?

    Regards,
    Tobias

    Plugin Author TobiasBg

    (@tobiasbg)

    Hi,

    I have another update on this: I’ve been investigating a solution that uses an icon font (see http://fortawesome.github.com/Font-Awesome/ ) for the sorting and pagination arrows. These look much cleaner, are actually text and not images, and are therefore much easier to style. For example, it is possible to manually set the color or the text-shadow via CSS. Also, they will look crisp on HiDPI/Retina displays automatically.
    You can see this in action at http://tablepress.org/demo/
    I would be happy to hear feedback!

    (The only small drawback of this is solution is that it doesn’t work in IE 7. But as IE 7 only has a usage share of around 0.5% this really doesn’t matter, IMHO. The sorting and pagination will of course still work, there just won’t be arrows visible in iE7.)

    Best wishes,
    Tobias

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)
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