Workaround to make a Tablepress table searchable

  • Resolved arlingtoner

    (@arlingtoner)


    2 years, 11 months ago

    I’ve used TablePress for two purposes: interactive tables with a nontrivial amount of information (that is going fine) and formatting of simple tabular information. The latter is motivated by scaling a table from a big screen to a phone. TablePress keeps the rows lined up and much more comprehensible than what I was able to achieve without a table. Unfortunately, that means that the information in the table isn’t searchable by the standard WordPress search or the Ivory Search that I’ve been using. Having just introduced a Search into my site, having the tabular information turn up in a search has become important enough that I’m playing around with the idea of replacing the two small TablePress tables I use for formatting with HTML tables, despite the hassle and learning that would require from me for me to get them to look and behave passably.

    That brings two thoughts to my mind:

    1. Do you have any thoughts on HTML/CSS that I might want to use to style an HTML table?

    2. I could avoid an HTML table entirely, if I would invisibly embed some text on the page that a search could find and by which a user wouldn’t be distracted/confused. Yes, I would need to hand-edit it in, but I think it would beat my groping about to make an acceptable HTML table.

Viewing 7 replies - 1 through 7 (of 7 total)

  • The Ivory Search plugin provides functionality to index and search TablePress shortcode contents since version 5.0

    Thread Starter arlingtoner

    (@arlingtoner)

    That is wonderful, although surprising to hear, as I’m running Ivory Search 5.2.1. Is there anything that I need to do to take advantage of the capability?

    I have a page that contains a TablePress table that has two columns and eight rows (see https://www.eribaa1.dreamhosters.com/planning-committee/). One of the columns contains names, one of which is “John Demoy”. The other column contains rows of strings, one of which is “Emeritus” in several rows.

    When I run a query for “John Demoy” (AND search with fuzzy search in my pages, posts, and media with the default WordPress Search Engine), I get several hits, but not one for the page that contains the table I mentioned above. A search for just “Emeritus” does find the page, but I believe that is because the word is in the text above the table.

    If you want to give things a spin, go to https://www.eribaa1.dreamhosters.com/search/, which is a front to a number of Ivory Search forms that I’ve created.

    After installing the latest plugin version, please build the index from the plugin index option by enabling the “Expand shortcodes before indexing” option and use the Inverted index search engine in the search form as shown below screenshots.

    View post on imgur.com

    Thread Starter arlingtoner

    (@arlingtoner)

    Wow. Thanks. I’ll give it a try today.

    Plugin Author TobiasBg

    (@tobiasbg)

    Hi,

    thanks for your post, and sorry for the trouble.

    I’m not familiar with these search plugins, but that approach does sound reasonable.

    That said, TablePress does actually have its own integration into the WordPress search, so that table content is actually searched (for tables that are embedded in posts and pages). I’m not sure why that is not working here, but it could be due to the use of special search plugins.

    Regards,
    Tobias

    Thread Starter arlingtoner

    (@arlingtoner)

    > TablePress does actually have its own integration into the WordPress search…

    That is good to know. How should I have found that out? As my search needs are pretty simple, had I known, I perhaps wouldn’t have immediately gone with a plugin. In doing so I lost the chance to find by experimentation that tables are searched. (Although I have to admit that I wouldn’t have guessed that due to the “on the fly” generation of the table through the shortcode mechanism, but maybe as a WordPress newbie, I’m still too ignorant about such things.)

    Plugin Author TobiasBg

    (@tobiasbg)

    Hi,

    good point. I should probably document that in a better way…
    To test this, you could try deactivating other plugins temporarily.

    Regards,
    Tobias

Viewing 7 replies - 1 through 7 (of 7 total)
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