Hi John,
thanks for your question.
Yes, that memorial wall uses WP-Table Reloaded, and they seem to have one three-column table for each letter of the alphabet, and all of these tables are wrapped in some JavaScript tabbing plugin, so that the table that corresponds to a letter is shown when that letter is clicked. All of this functionaliy is outside of WP-Table Reloaded, and they seem to be using WP-Table Reloaded only to get a three-column layout for the individual names.
The same is possible with TablePress, without problems. You would just have to create 26 tables, one for each letter, with one row and three columns each, and fill that with the names, wrapped in the HTML code for a unordered list.
Now, while this is a working solution, I’d actually recommend against this approach. Using a one-row, three-column table for such purposes is not really the semantically correct usage of a table (which is designed to show tabular data, like in a spreadsheet). Instead, I’d recommend to create that three-column layout with a more modern approach, e.g. with the plugin like http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/grid-columns/
The drawback with that approach might be that everything is then in the content of the page, while the table approach has a single table for each letter, which might be easier to manage in the end.
So, both approaches will work fine, and there’s nothing really that you have to be careful about (except maybe with clean HTML code for the lists in the tables).
Regards,
Tobias
Tobias,
Thanks for your most excellent advice!
John
Hi John,
sure, no problem! You are very welcome!
Best wishes,
Tobias
Tobias,
I have a few additional questions:
Will TablePress work with the Easy Custom Content Types plugin? I hope so, because it would be so much easier to give the client an easy interface to create a memorial listing. Could I create the content type, and paste the shortcode into the table content cells, e.g, Table Content (A) [memorial id=23 /]
[memorial id=24 /]
[memorial id=25 /]..etc? Would that work?
Second, does TablePress have any mechanism to alphabetize listings? I’m guess probably not within the context of what I’m trying to do.
Thanks,
John
Hi John,
I don’t know the Easy Custom Content Types plugin, but from what I can see, this should not be a problem. Using those [memorial] Shortcodes in table cells is no problem.
However, if you can use such a plugin to create the individual memorial entries, the best solution probably is to a grid columns plugin like the one I suggested. With that, you’ll basically just have to put all the Shortcodes in to the page in the correct order and get a nice column layout.
About alphabetizing: Now, TablePress does have a sorting function, but it can only sort on the data it sees, which will be the [memorial] Shortcodes, so that’s not really going to help.
Regards,
Tobias
Hi John,
no problem. You are welcome again 🙂
Best wishes,
Tobias
