Expand/Hide accordion feature explained

July 4th, 2009 by Tobias 19 comments »

During the last weeks several people have asked me about the Expand/Hide functionality on the WP-Table Reloaded plugin page and the documentation page:

Example

Example Content of Example Section

Some people asked whether it is a WordPress plugin or if I could explain how it works. That’s why I decided to write this article, so all of you can benefit from it.
» Read more: Expand/Hide accordion feature explained

WP-Table Reloaded 1.3 ready for WP 2.8

June 9th, 2009 by Tobias 20 comments »

Because of the upcoming WordPress 2.8, I updated WP-Table Reloaded to 1.3. The automatic update should be available through your WordPress admin area shortly.

New features and bugfixes include:

  • Fixed bug in Text Widget support for upcoming WordPress 2.8
  • Fixed small bug for the button in toolbar of the HTML editor.
  • Existing tables can be replaced upon import.
  • The Table ID can be changed.
  • Import from URLs (if you use WP >= 2.7) or files on the webserver.
  • WordPress shortcodes are supported within the table cells.
  • Input fields were changed to textareas to allow entering longer texts.
  • You can add multiple rows/columns to a table more easily.

For the complete list of fixed or implemented issues, have a look at the issue tracker on Google Code.

Additionally, most of the translations were updated and Brazilian Portuguese and Belorussian were added as new available languages.

You can download the latest release 1.3 from the plugin’s page or from the WordPress Plugin Directory.

If you like the plugin, I’d be very happy if you would rate it in the WordPress Plugin Directory. You also might 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.

Have fun with the new release!

WP-Table Reloaded 1.2.1 (bugfix release)

May 18th, 2009 by Tobias 17 comments »

Some users experienced a weird bug when trying to activate the last release 1.2 of WP-Table Reloaded: They received an error message saying that there was a parse error in the plugin file. A lot of other users (including me) could not reproduce this error and did not find any syntax errors.

But thanks to Alex Rabe who provided the solution in a thread in the WordPress support forums, the bug was located and removed. I had accidentally used the short php opener tag “<?” which is not available on all systems and therefore led to the parse error.

The latest release 1.2.1 should now work for everybody again and is now available.
(Note: You don’t have to upgrade if everything is working fine for you.)

Additionally to the bugfix, I added a Polish language file, courtesy of Alex Kortan.

You can download the latest release 1.2.1 from the plugin’s page or from the WordPress Plugin Directory.

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

WP-Table Reloaded 1.2 now available!

May 10th, 2009 by Tobias 13 comments »

Development continues and I’m proud to announce the immediate availability of WP-Table Reloaded 1.2.

The automatic update should be available through your WordPress admin area shortly. Remember: In case you’re upgrading from a version smaller then 1.1, please make a backup of your CSS stylesheet first.

There were a few bugs fixed, but those shouldn’t have affected a lot of people as they occured in rare occasions only.

But the list of new features is a little longer:

  • new button “Table” in the toolbar of the HTML-editor to easily include a table (without having to know the Shortcode) into a post/page
  • Bulk actions: Copying, Deleting and Importing (from wp-Table) several tables at the same time
  • new parameters for the Shortcode to change settings when displaying a table
    • (This includes a possibility for easier usage of different column widths, showing only certain parts of a table and all table-specific settings that are accessible in the backend.)
  • added Template Tag function (with all possibilities the Shortcode has) to enable you to show a table in places where Shortcodes don’t work (e.g. if your theme is not widget-ready, or in the footer)
  • table data is sortable in the backend
  • new import/export class for CSV

There also were some changes “under the hood”, which should make the plugin more robust and bring a higher performance. For example, the inclusion of the Tablesorter plugin was optimized, so that it’s now only loaded if there really is a table using it on the page. Also, all JavaScript is loaded in the page footer (where possible) for faster page loading.

For the complete list of fixed or implemented issues, have a look at the issue tracker on Google Code.

Additionally, most of the translations were updated and Czech was added as a new available language. (French, Spanish and Turkish are not yet updated, but will be as soon as I receive the translations.)

As promised in earlier versions, I have written a Documentation (that includes more technical details) than the plugin page, especially regarding the Shortcode, the Template Tag function, Import/Export, CSS styling or the Tablesorter.

You can download the latest release 1.2 from the plugin’s page or from the WordPress Plugin Directory.

If you like the plugin, I’d be very happy if you would rate it in the WordPress Plugin Directory. You also might 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.

I hope you enjoy the new release!

latest release: WP-Table Reloaded 1.1

April 28th, 2009 by Tobias 1 comment »

IMPORTANT: PLEASE MAKE SURE TO HAVE A BACKUP OF YOUR CSS-STYLESHEET (IF YOU MADE ANY CHANGES TO IT) AS IT WILL BE OVERWRITTEN DURING THE AUTOMATIC UPDATE BY WORDPRESS!

Just a week after release 1.0.1, WP-Table Reloaded 1.1 is available now.

Unfortunately there was a severe bug, that prevented the usage of the “Plugin Options” screen on servers with PHP4, but is fixed now. Thanks to dastoffer for reporting it!

I also had to change the handling of the CSS styling again.
The newly introduced select-box for CSS files was dropped again. Instead there now is a field to enter CSS styling information directly, which will then be stored in the database. The reason for this is that any files inside the plugin folder (including CSS files created/copied by users) are deleted by WordPress when updating the plugin. As some users don’t make backups of plugin folders before updating them, they might lose their (in hard work created) CSS style. This is why the plugin will no longer store any user data (like CSS files) inside the plugin folder but in the database.
This method also has the advantage that the CSS can be more easily changed by inexperienced users as they won’t have to edit any files on their server anymore.
For more experienced users I recommend a different approach though: They should just include the CSS in their theme’s style.css file. That way it also won’t be overwritten when the plugin is upgraded and it can be cached by the browser to save bandwidth.
(Examples for the CSS can be found on the plugin page.)

The “Edit Table” screen also has a new feature: Next to the “Swap rows/cols” button, you can now find buttons to easily insert an HTML link or image into a table cell. This should greatly help people who don’t know much about HTML. Thanks to Romeo for proposing this.
That screen now also has the “Update Changes” and “Save and go back” buttons above the table, so you don’t have to scroll that much when saving a large table. Props to Markus for this suggestion.

For all users who are in need of changing column widths (and don’t want to use CSS for some reason) there is another possibility now:
You can just add the parameter column_widths="40px|50px|30px" to your shortcode, where the column widths are separated by a “|”. For example, the shortcode [table id=5 column_widths=”20px|40px|60px|80px” /] will make the (here 4) columns of table 5 20px, 40px, 60px and 80px wide by inline CSS styles.

And: As if this is not enough, the plugin now comes with new languages: Additionally to English, German, Swedish, and Turkish, it now also supports Albanian, French, Russian, and Spanish.

You can download the latest release 1.1 from the plugin’s page or from the WordPress Plugin Directory.

If you like the plugin, I’d be very happy if you would rate it in the WordPress Plugin Directory. You also might consider donating.

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 on the plugin’s page on this website.