Jason Murphy

wp-tables makes pretty wordpress tables

Sep 2, 2007 Blog General, Open Source

Yesterday I posted a list of domain names that I am selling. While it may look like a simple post up front, it really took some WordPress magic to make that happen.

WordPress is a fantastic tool, but sometimes it overlooks the basics. The list of domain names I have for sale is nothing more than a simple table with data in it. It’s maintained through an external .CSV file. If it were just HTML that I pasted into a post, I’d have a more difficult time maintaining it.
The intention of that list is to be a list that I maintain over a longer period of time. If I sell domains, I may need to remove them from the list. If I buy more I’ll have to add them. If I want to add a column of data, like expiration dates or registrar company, or if I wanted to delete a column like prices, it would be pretty difficult to do that if it was straight html. Editing 100 rows worth of table data is a bitch in plain HTML.

Luckily, some genius by the name of Alex Rabe wrote a plugin called wp-table. This plugin lets you import all your data from a .csv file, customize the look and format of your table, manage several tables, and present any table on your wordpress site by using a single line of text. If I need to edit data to the table, I can do that pretty easily within wp-table and the post wordpress rendered version will automatically be updated.

I still have yet to toy around with the CSS styles, but I found a fantastic resource of CSS tables to get me started. Between the plugin and the stylesheets, I can now create some pretty impressive tables using wordpress.

•   Today is Day 25 out of 30 for My Own Thirty Day Challenge.