Hard to work with when you have many tables

  • I was quite happy with this when I had a few tables on a site, say less than 10. But when you have many it gets very challenging remembering which is which.

    You cannot filter or reorder them in the backend, you can give them a new ID that is not number-based so that you could at least make sense of them in human-readable form but the ID column is very narrow and does not expand.. so that is not such a good option either (you have to have a very sort basic naming convention and that does not even fit).

    It is not WPML-compliant, so you have to make all of your various languages tables in the same backend page which can add yet another level of complexity: imagine having 4 languages with 30 some tables you end up with 120 un-reorderable tables.

    You can not put tables in the trash to say.. help keeping them out of sight for a bit while you do some cleaning up.. you can only delete them.

    You can not do any sort of “Quick Edit” as you can with posts, CPT’s etc.

    All in all as with many many tools, heavy use exposes shortcomings. The responsiveness leaves a lot to be desired. A tool that felt great for fairly light use becomes cumbersome when put under strain. And a lot of the time it is the backend experience that is where things get fishy.

    I’m trying to find a good (and short..) naming convention and adding a description for each. I wish the dev would at least make the ID column automatically expand to accommodate the characters.

    Also my tables are fairly simple in and of themselves, but I could see how challenging it would be to work with massive ones with a lot of content.
    This could be improved so much, I’d even pay for some sort of lifetime license if the things listed above were implemented (I had paid a little support money on this way back).

Viewing 1 replies (of 1 total)
  • Plugin Author TobiasBg

    (@tobiasbg)

    Hi,

    thanks for your thorough and fair review, I really appreciate it!
    I’m really sorry that you are experiencing these difficulties, and I’ll gladly try to suggest ideas:

    About filtering or reordering in the backend: I’m not sure why this is not working for you, by by default, there is a search field and a “Search Tables” button above the “List of Tables” (see this screenshot). In addition, it is possible to sort/reorder the list by using the sort arrow icons that appear when hovering over the table header cells of the list.

    To make the ID column wider, please try adding this to the end of your theme’s “functions.php” file:

    add_action( 'admin_print_styles', 'tablepress_input_field_size', 20 );
function tablepress_input_field_size() {
	$current_screen = get_current_screen();
	if ( 'tablepress_list' === $current_screen->id ) {
?>
<style type="text/css" media="screen">
.tablepress-all-tables thead .column-table_id {
	width: 150px;
}
</style>
<?php
}
}

    Regarding WPML: Why are you saying that TablePress is not compliant to WPML and not that WPML is not compliant to TablePress ??
    The approach with one table for each language is the most suitable in my opinion (and it works with every translation plugin and not just WPML). Just pre- or postfix the table ID with the language abbreviation (“en-products” and “de-products” for example). Another idea would be to work with the TablePress Row Filter Extension from https://tablepress.org/extensions/row-filter/ here. You would just copy each row for each language and use the language abbreviation as the filter term, e.g. in an an extra but hidden first column.

    Features like a Trash or Quick Edit are indeed not supported, mainly because the work required to implement them outweighs the potential benefits (taking into account all users).

    Responsiveness is indeed another issue, but unfortunately, due to how HTML tables work and what people do with them, there is no “one size fits all” solution here. I try to give suggestions using the Extension from https://tablepress.org/extensions/responsive-tables/ though.

    Summarizing, I think that a large chunk of things that you are missing is actually possible. I hope that my suggestions will be helpful, and I’ll of course try to assist in any way possible!

    Best wishes,
    Tobias

Viewing 1 replies (of 1 total)
  • The topic ‘Hard to work with when you have many tables’ is closed to new replies.