Thread

I have a few sites for schools that have class schedules that need frequent updating (example1, example2).

I usually have these sites set up so the school’s admins can update content themselves (usually with Markdown or Textile), however the tables I usually keep in plain html and update myself.

Basically I’m looking for an alternative so the school’s admins can do this themselves too. I know Textile handles tables but only really basic ones. Any suggestions?

Another hassle is that these schools often send me Excel spreadsheets containing their latest schedule which I then have to transfer to clean HTML. Excel’s export to HTML creates such convoluted code that I often end up writing the table from scratch… any suggestions there for making this faster/easier?

Thanks in advance for any/all ideas 😊

Hiya,

One really really easy way to do it would be using the Multi Text extension. This would mean that you could then just have the people literally enter the data into cells just as if they were placing the information into the table itself. The rest would then be handled with markup in the template(s).

There is one slight drawback with this method in that once the extension is set up it is set up for a certain amount of columns but if that isn’t going to change then this is by far one of the easiest ways, I think.

I’ve attached a couple of images that show this page and how it is done.

Hope that helps a bit.

Best wishes,

Mark

Mark, thanks for the suggestion, I’ll certainly give this a testdrive. Cheers! :coolsmile:

No problem at all. Hope it goes well for you.

Best wishes,

Mark

Just wanted to point out that this extension: LG Data Matrix does a pretty good job of making a table editable for non-html savvy end users.
Excellent work, Levy :coolsmile:

Yep that one too 😉

I haven’t had chance to test that one out yet and nearly always use the Multi Text one at the moment only because I don’t need the extra features but LG Data Matrix definitely does look very good.

Best wishes,

Mark