Table Caption

Hi Matthias,

thanks for your question!

Now, TablePress does have an option to show the table name above the table (there’s a checkbox for that on the table’s “Edit” screen), but by default, this does not use the HTML <caption> tag, but an <h2> heading (with the CSS class tablepress-table-name.

Using the <caption> tag is possible by using the tablepress_print_caption_text plugin filter hook. If you prefer that over an <h2>, I’ll try to get some example code ready later today or tomorrow.

Regards,
Tobias

Hi Paul,

thanks for helping out!
Yes, that’s a caption for an image, but Matthias wants table captions which is a slightly different concept.

Regards,
Tobias

Hi,

good news: I’ve developed a small TablePress Extension that prints the name of a table in an HTML <caption> element. You can then style that via CSS, just as one your current site.

To use that, you’ll just have to install and activate http://tablepress.org/download/extension/tablepress-table-caption-html-tag.zip as a regular WordPress plugin.
But before that, you’ll need to update to the TablePress development version from http://tablepress.org/download/tablepress-dev.zip . Just download that and replace the “tablepress” plugin folder on your server with that from the ZIP archive. The dev version fixes a small bug in the caption handling that I discovered when developing the Extension.

Regards,
Tobias

Hi,

thanks for the kind words! 🙂

1. Can you explain why you don’t like the approach with the TablePress Extension here? Or what would adding this to TablePress directly bring as a benefit for you?

2. That’s possible with another small Extension: http://tablepress.org/extensions/remove-edit-link/

Regards,
Tobias

Hi,

great to hear that this helps!

For 1.: My stand on this is the complete opposite 🙂 Plugins and their options (the same goes for themes) should be as easy to use as possible, with as few options as possible. Those just confuse new users (I’ve experienced this in WP-Table Reloaded, myself.)
This paradigm of “Decisions, not Options” is also followed by WordPress, and explained nicely at http://wordpress.org/about/philosophy/
And there’s no real point of worrying about the number of plugins. That’s not problematic at all.

Best wishes,
Tobias

Hi Arno,

thanks for your post!
Yes, you will still need to switch to the development version, as the change that is necessary for this Extension is not part of 0.9-RC.

At the moment, I don’t have plans to add support for these new HTML tags into the UI (which is already too crowded). But with the Extension, and a small modification in it, you can easily achieve this yourself, and for example automatically put the table description into the summary field.

Regards,
Tobias

Hi,

sure, no problem! You are very welcome!

Best wishes,
Tobias

Hi,

thanks for your post and sorry for the trouble!

Adding an option for this is not really an option, as it would make the user interface much more complex and cluttered. And most users have no idea what the difference is between <h2> and <h3>.
Instead, I suggest that you use a plugin filter hook, to globally change the used HTML tag. Please try adding this to your theme’s “functions.php”:

add_filter( 'tablepress_print_name_html_tag', 'tablepress_use_h3_name_tag', 10, 2 );
function tablepress_use_h3_name_tag( $tag, $table_id ) {
  return 'h3';
}

(As a sidenote on your last paragraph: Using tables as “columns” for a portion of the page is not really the best way in modern webdesign. You should consider something like http://wordpress.org/plugins/grid-columns/ for this.)

Regards,
Tobias