Add Table Buttons to Visual Editor Kitchen Sink (2nd row)

[lloydbudd]

Add Table Buttons to Visual Editor Kitchen Sink (2nd row)

This regular comes on the forums. Tables are an infrequent, but very natural way to present information. In an edu environment they are essential.

I suspect you have used tables in your posts, but have the expertise to enter the html directly yourself.

I think the general usefulness, and unobtrusive 2nd row experience makes this a candidate for core, and not plugin material.

[azaozz]

From implementation point of view there would be two areas that would need attention:

• There are eleven default table buttons in ​TinyMCE (third row). Adding all would extend the second row a lot. We can probably remove 4 without limiting the functionality much but even 7 new buttons make the toolbar quite longer.

• There are some rare cases when wpautop may break complex tables, usually a paragraph in a table whitin another table, etc.

[aquaglow]

I'm interested in this feature also, and would like to try adding it.

When specifying the TinyMCE buttons, it's currently a single option "tablecontrols" which adds all 11 table buttons. Would this be acceptable on a third row (also revealed by "show kitchen sink")? Even if you remove a few, putting them on the second row will cause problems on smaller resolutions.

Any advice on implementation would be useful, I'm still finding my way around the codebase.

[iseulde]

+1

The TinyMCE 4.0 table plugin is much better. All the buttons are now under one drop down.

[paaljoachim]

Hi

Adding the table button to the default TinyMCE Editor would create an easy way for a lot of people to add visual columns and rows. Click the button and inserts the amount of table cells needed. Then just fill in the needed info and use some CSS to define the look.

​https://www.dropbox.com/s/djqwsw7sjf8ykbj/TinyMCE-Table-Cells.mp4?dl=0

[iseulde]

I'm all for tables used for tabular data but I think WordPress shouldn't encourage the use of tables for layout purposes...

Regarding this concern raised by @afercia earlier this year: we could discourage adding anything more than text in these tables with the visual editor by disabling certain actions. I'm not entirely sure if this is a good idea, as we would disable things that were previously possible, but you'd still be able to preview the content with the visual editor, and adjust it with the text editor if you really want/need to. You'd have to add the table in the text editor first anyway. Thoughts?

[azaozz]

Similarly to #6331, we have a Table block in the block editor now. Considering this ticket "fixed".