Table with time sensitive data

Hi,

thanks for your question.

Unfortunately, something like this is not really possible with TablePress, as that’s not really the intended use case. TablePress was designed to show static data, but and is not really suited for such highly dynamical data that you describe. TablePress wouldn’t be useful for that anyway, as you wouldn’t be using the managing functions anyway, and I can imagine that you are mostly interested in the sorting/search/pagination features.

So, instead, I suggest that you do this without TablePress, but with some custom programming, for example via PHP in a WordPress Page Template. That PHP code would need to get the data from the different areas of your site, and create the HTML for an HTML table. You could then just manually add the sorting/search/pagination features by manually adding the JavaScript library that TablePress uses for this, DataTables from https://www.datatables.net

Regards,
Tobias

Tobias,

Thank you for taking the time to get back to me. I’ve been exploring this plugin and have found some ways around my issue.

One other question I was hoping you could answer is if it would be possible to restrict the search function to certain tagged word options. So rather than letting the user type the word in the search box, I would like to offer a menu of words that would narrow down their search. Let me know if/how this would be possible.

Much appreciated,
-Ryan

Hi Ryan,

no problem, you are very welcome! Good to hear that you found a way around the initial problem!

About the restriction of the search: As the search is provided by the DataTables JavaScript library (see https://www.datatables.net), this would have to be implemented in JavaScript, ie. by using the DataTables API for this. Unfortunately, I’m not an expert with that, so I can’t really help with that ??
However, there is an add-on for DataTables, that automatically adds drop downs of all column entries (one for each column), that might be useful: https://datatables.net/extras/thirdparty/ColumnFilterWidgets/DataTables/extras/ColumnFilterWidgets/
I have packaged that DataTables add-on into a “TablePress Extension”, so that it can be used easily with TablePress. Just install and activate https://github.com/downloads/TobiasBg/TablePress-Extensions/tablepress-datatables-column-filter-widgets.zip as a regular WordPress plugin. You can then extend your Shortcode from something like

[table id=1 /]

to

[table id=1 datatables_columnfilterwidgets=true datatables_columnfilterwidgets_exclude_columns="2,3,5" /]

The first new parameter activates the feature, while the second parameter can be used to only show the drop down for desired columns.

When using this, you could then turn off the regular search input field by unchecking the “Search/Filtering” checkbox on the table’s “Edit” screen.

Regards,
Tobias

Tobias,

You’ve been more than helpful and it is very much appreciated. I’m still fairly new to programming and design so some of this stuff is hard for me to understand for the time being.

What would be great is if you could refer me to some reading material that explains DataTables in depth so I can really understand what I’m working with. It really seems to me that DataTables could be the key to the project I’m working on and I would really like to be able to just learn all the ins and outs of this plugin.

Thanks again for your help,
Ryan

Hi Ryan,

the best site for that would obviously be the DataTables website and its documentation, at https://www.datatables.net
A good starting point might be the introduction and the “Get started” guide at https://datatables.net/blog/Getting_started_with_DataTables%3A_First_steps

Note that DataTables is not directly a WordPress plugin. It is more of a general JavaScript library, that can be applied to any HTML table (and that’s what TablePress does with its tables).

Best wishes,
Tobias