Sorting column should not sort on URL code

Hi everyone,

after setting up my table presenting several different projects, I found out that the sorting functionality does not do what I want it to do. In my table the first column only contains the project number. All project numbers are numbered in the same fashion (i.e. PR-2013-00.05-001 to …-029). In some cells there’s an embedded link, whereby clicking on the project number takes you to the project page. Half of the projects don’t have a separate page, so here the cell contains just the project number.

Now for my problem: When I sort on the first column, the project codes are no longer in the order I want them to be in: -001 to -029. TablePress orders them neatly in alphabetical order, but also takes the URL code into account, resulting in the project numbers with embedded link before the project numbers without a link. The code in these cells obviously starts with ‘a href=…’ which make it appear before the project codes that do not contain an embedded URL and start with ‘PR-2013-…’.

It’s not really a problem at the moment, since the table is near 30 rows long, but as it grows larger, it may become more of a nuisance.

Is there a way to make the plugin neglect the URL code (or anything between <…> for that matter, cause I expect bold or italic to give the same problem) and just take the cell contents that are shown in the actual table into account?

Many thanks,

Paul

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