Introducing WP-Table Reloaded Extensions

December 28th, 2009 by Tobias 1 comment »

One of the main additions to version 1.5 of WP-Table Reloaded were so-called “Plugin Actions” and “Plugin Filters”. Both are part of the “Plugin Hooks”, a widely used concept within WordPress. This explanation from the WordPress Codex sums it up.

The way Plugin hooks work is that at various times while WordPress is running, WordPress checks to see if any Plugins have registered functions to run at that time, and if so, the functions are run. These functions modify the default behavior of WordPress.

Well known hooks are for example “wp_head” and “wp_footer”, which allow adding functions to the head and footer of a page that was generated by WordPress.

Actions and Filters can not only be used by the WordPress Core, but also by plugins and it is possible to add new ones. And this is what I did in WP-Table Reloaded 1.5. Many of these hooks were added to the plugin which now allow other plugins to add or change functions in WP-Table Reloaded.

These new functions may be as short as one line or as long as a complete new plugin. For WP-Table Reloaded, I will – over the course of the next weeks and months, but with no fixed time frame or frequency – present such pieces of code on this website, as a series of blog posts. As these code snippets are not complete WordPress plugins, I will call them WP-Table Reloaded Extensions, as that describes what they are a little bit better. » Read more: Introducing WP-Table Reloaded Extensions

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Christmas Surprise for WP-Table Reloaded

December 24th, 2009 by Tobias 5 comments »

This post goes out to all supporters, translators, donors, friends, and users of WP-Table Reloaded.

I would like to thank you all for using the plugin and/or helping me to make it better. When publishing the plugin I had not envisioned how successful it would be by the end of the year. So, thanks to everybody for making this possible!

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to you and your families! I hope that everybody can use these days for a little bit of recreation and happy times with your loved ones.

And I have a special Christmas Surprise for everybody: I’d like to announce that the next version of the plugin (1.6) will have two very, very nice new features that a lot of people have been asking for, but that I was (until now) unable to provide:
WP-Table Reloaded 1.6 will enable you to combine several cells of your tables to one larger one (in HTML terms: “rowspan” and “colspan”). This adds some great possibilities in designing tables.
I’m also happy to announce that starting with that version, the integrated WordPress Search will find search terms within tables, so that visitors of your websites can enjoy your content even more.

The code for this is already implemented, but I still need to do some testing. I’ll also have to fix a few small problems in the latest 1.5 release. If everything goes well (and to give the translators some time), 1.6 will probably be available in early January.

Thanks again for this great year of plugin development!

Sincerely,
Tobias

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Get it now: WP-Table Reloaded 1.5

December 19th, 2009 by Tobias 5 comments »

I just finished up WP-Table Reloaded 1.5. The automatic update should be available through your WordPress admin area shortly.

If you are updating from a previous version, please read the instructions below!

Here are some of the new features and changes:

  • added the DataTables JavaScript library with these features: sorting, pagination, filtering, TableTools (Copy to Clipboard, CSV/XLS export, Print) (also added these to the “List Tables” screen)
  • heavily redesigned the “Edit Table” screen: bulk operations for inserting, deleting, …, warning message if changes not yet saved
  • added features to the “Plugin Options”: set access requirements (user roles) to the plugin and the Options, Change position of the plugin in the admin menu
  • better loading/inclusion of CSS
  • export/import a dump file (with ALL tables/options/settings at once)
  • many, many plugin filters and actions for plugin customisation

You can read more about them in my post about the beta test and in the post on the development status.

Unfortunately I also had to drop a few translations, because they have not been updated in a while. But thanks to the translators for their work!
Most people shouldn’t care, but this might be important for some users: Version 1.5 does no longer support WordPress 2.6! You will need to run WordPress 2.7 or newer! And already an announcement: WP-Table Reloaded 1.6 will require WordPress 2.8 or newer! So I recommend updating to WordPress 2.9, which just came out, soon.

Special thanks go to Pavel aka Separatista for his tremendous support in finding many bugs and doing the Czech translation!

You can download the latest release 1.5 from the plugin’s page or from the WordPress Plugin Directory.

Update Instructions

These instructions only apply if you update the plugin from a previous version.

  • Immediately after updating, check if your tables show up correctly. Then proceed with these steps:
  • If you are using Internet Explorer 7 as your web browser, please update to Internet Explorer 8 or switch to another browser like Firefox or Chrome. This will make your surfing experience faster and remove some problems that might occur with JavaScript. If you are using Internet Explorer 8, make sure to disable the “Compatibility Mode” for your WordPress website.
  • The new DataTables library will not automatically be enabled for you. You can enable it (which I recommend) in the “Plugin Options”. Make sure, all tables show up ok afterwards!
  • CSS loading was changed. Because of that the Custom CSS textarea in the “Plugin Options” now only needs your very own customisations as the Default CSS will be loaded from a file. So, if you have not changed the Custom CSS before and did not add anything, copy the contents of the Custom CSS textarea into a temporary file and remove all text from the textarea and save the options. Check if your tables show up correctly. If yes, you can delete the temporary file, if not, restore the contents. If you did add customisations, only those need to be left in the textarea, commands that were not added by you can be removed.
  • If everything is still ok, you’re good to go and enjoy the new features! :-)

If you like the plugin, I’d be very happy if you would rate it in the WordPress Plugin Directory. You might also consider a donation or have a look at my Amazon wishlist. This will encourage me to further develop the plugin and keep giving countless hours of support. Thank you!

If you experience any trouble, find bugs or have feature requests, please don’t hesitate to contact me via the means mentioned in the support section. Please make sure to carefully read the plugin’s page as well as the Documentation. There will also be a page with Frequently Asked Questions available shortly.

Have fun with the new features!

And by the way: I’ll have a special surprise for everybody on Christmas! :-)

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WP-Table Reloaded 1.5 beta test

December 5th, 2009 by Tobias 8 comments »

More than two months after the release of version 1.4, the development of WP-Table Reloaded 1.5 is almost finished.
Among the many new features and enhancements are (might not be complete):

  • added the DataTables JavaScript library with these features:
    • sorting, pagination, filtering, TableTools (Copy to Clipboard, CSV/XLS export, Print)
    • (also added these to the “List Tables” screen)
  • heavily redesigned the “Edit Table” screen
    • Bulk operations for inserting, deleting, …
    • Warning message if changes not yet saved
  • added features to the “Plugin Options”
    • set access requirements (user roles) to the plugin and the Options
    • Change position of the plugin in the admin menu
    • better loading/inclusion of CSS
  • many, many plugin filters and actions for plugin customisation
  • export/import a dump file (with ALL tables/options/settings at once)
  • fixed some minor bugs, errors and glitches
  • optimized and restructured big parts of the code
  • dropped support for outdated WordPress 2.6

There’s more about some of the new features in this development status announcement.

Because of the many new features and to give the translators enough time to translate the many new or changed strings, I again ask you to participate in a public beta test. The current plan is to release WP-Table Reloaded 1.5 before Christmas, but after the release of WordPress 2.9, which also currently is in beta and should be available in the next weeks.

So, if you are willing to help and want to take part in the beta test, please download the developer version “1.5-beta4″.

Note that I dropped support of WordPress 2.6, so you will need WordPress 2.7 or higher (tested up to WP 2.9-beta2) to use the new release! (I did this, because 2.6 is quite old now and required a lot of special attention, because some new functions are not available.)

To install it, deactivate your current version, replace the folder “wp-table-reloaded” in your “plugins” folder with the one from the downloaded zip-file and activate the plugin again. Deactivation and Activation are VERY IMPORTANT!

BUT: Please note that this is a beta release. Although I’ve tested it on my site, I do NOT recommend using it on your production site, just yet. As always: Please make sure to have a backup of your files and your database before installing it. Thanks!

If you encounter any bugs, errors or problems, please leave them here as a comment. Feature requests are also welcome, but will most probably not be implemented in the 1.5-release, but later.

If you are a translator (or if you would like to translate the plugin into your language), please go ahead and do so. There’s .pot-file included in case you need it.
There are very many new strings, because I rephrased some sentences, so that they are (hopefully) easier to understand. But: Don’t panic! You’ll have at least ten days of time for the translation and most probably more!
After you are done, please email me the *.po and the *.mo file of your language. In any case: Please let me know, if you will be translating the new version or if you can not do it (for whatever reasons). Big thanks to all translators!

(By the way: I use the “Codestyling Localization” plugin to translate the plugin to German as it’s quite easy and more comfortable to use than editors like poEdit.)

Thanks already to all beta-testers and translators! As always: Please don’t hesitate to comment or email me with any questions!

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Status of WP-Table Reloaded development

November 4th, 2009 by Tobias 9 comments »

As the development of my WordPress plugin WP-Table Reloaded continues, I’d like to push out a small status update message to all fellow plugin users and contributors.

I’m working on version 1.5 of the plugin, and I have a few new additions and changes planned: Probably the biggest changes are the extended interfaces for table editing and the newly added “DataTables” script. It will also be possible to write extensions to my plugin and you can export and import all tables at once.
(This post got rather long, sorry about that :-) )
» Read more: Status of WP-Table Reloaded development

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