There’s a plugin that’s worth mentioning. My clients and blog readers know I seldom tout specific plugins for WordPress – mostly because they are made by independent developers who are part of the WordPress community. There’s always some turnover as new Plugins appear on the scene. There could be something else looming on the plugin horizon, but right now Websimon is the best solution to getting tables on pages or posts.
A recent client had pricing that needed to go on their site. The pricing wasn’t just one table with rows and columns, but multiple tables (one for each program they offered). Using a traditional HTML table with lots of code wasn’t the answer for the client because they wanted to update their WordPress website. It had to be a Plugin that allow for not just one table, but multiple tables. It also needed to be something that looked like a table, perhaps an Excel spread sheet so what they saw in the Dashboard looked familiar… looked logical. And because they were new to WordPress and already expressing fears that they would wipe out pages when they started editing and updating, the table needed to be set up in such a way that they didn’t wipe out surrounding text and code.
Websimon was the answer.
This plugin allows the user to create multiple tables and embed any table on any page or any post they want.
The area where the table are created (under the Tools tab after the Plugin is installed), looks a bit like Excel with rows and columns. There’s even an area where the table design and appearance can be tweaked to match the design of the website. It’s easy for a new user to see how data is structured in the tables.
The tables are set up outside of the page editing area and only a short code is used to place the table in a page. That means a newbie user may wipe out the short code when doing a broad revision to a page, but they won’t wipe out their table data!
Thank you Websimon, nice job!
