About two years ago (yeah, really!) I reviewed the WP-Table Reloaded WordPress plugin on our show The Sweet Plugin. After a rebranding and reworking of the code, WP-Table Reloaded is now TablePress. The developer Tobias relaunched the plugin, renamed it with a much better name, and revamped a number of the plugin’s features.
One of the biggest improvements has to be the all tables view, which feels almost exactly the same as the edit posts and pages WordPress screens do. Honestly, the closer any plugin or theme can get to WordPress core UI, or feeling like a real part of WordPress, the better it is.
Adding and editing tables feels better too. A lot of what was there before is still in place, but nicer. Manipulating table content feels much better; you can drag and drop rows and columns around and change the display order of table cells with one click. This sort of table manipulation would have been much more time consuming under the old WP-Table Reloaded plugin.
TablePress makes the table shortcodes much more obvious too. Each table management screen includes the table’s shortcode at the top of the screen, and they’re quickly available from the all tables screen too.
TablePress also implements something I don’t remember seeing in WP-Table Reloaded, and that’s the ability to choose where in the WordPress dashboard the TablePress menu is located. This is one of those options which I could see popping up in any of the more complex WordPress plugins out there. Let users choose whether the menu item displays right below comments, at the bottom below settings, within the tools menu, and so on. I think this is an approach I can get behind — again, only in plugins that potentially warrant prominent menu placement in the first place.
Where to grab TablePress
You can download TablePress from the WordPress.org plugin directory, and based on everything I’ve seen there’s really no reason to hold back. Your tables will need to be exported from the old plugin and imported into the new plugin, but really that seems like a pretty seamless process.
Tobias also runs TablePress.org, a nice resource for using the plugin.
Have you switched over to TablePress yet? What do you think of the new, rebranded, and updated WordPress plugin?
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