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FoundationTables WordPress Plugin
Succeeding the popularity of Zurb’s famous framework, FoundationTables is a WordPress plugin written by ERA404 to harness the responsiveness the framework provides, and extend the WordPress page editor with a new toolset to easily insert, edit, style and delete Foundation-ready tables.
ERA404 encoders and developers wrote the plugin after several clients with WordPress sites requested easily editable tabled data. Previously, no core toolset existed to both build these collections of information and publish them responsively. With the FoundationTables plugin, users can now take advantage of Foundation’s responsiveness for different screen sizes and devices, such as stacking data to fit the width of the narrower window of a mobile phone.
Managing table data can be tricky from the WordPress rich text editor as it provides only a small area to write in each table cell. The FoundationTables plugin enlarges each cell to offer users a larger window for editing copy, inserting imagery, and adding markup.
Once the content is finalized, the table can be inserted anywhere within the page copy using a shortcode. Easier still, FoundationTables offers a new editor button to insert the preferred table at the cursor position. Because the plugin doesn’t limit the number of tables that can be created on each page, the table can be inserted anywhere in the content, in any order, and can be previewed directly from the back-end. Switching views from presentation to code, the table markup is collapsed to a single placeholder, increasing usability as users see page content without code clutter.
FoundationTables comes pre-packaged with several design styles, but a separate CSS is also included for unobstructed custom theming. The styles used in v0.1 (beta) are greyscale, but color can easily be added by quick adjustments to the CSS. These styles are:
FoundationTables default style: Standard Grey Table with a Highlighted Header Row
FoundationTables default style: Standard Grey Table with a Highlighted First Column
FoundationTables default style: Simple Grey Table
The FoundationTables plugin, which is now in beta, can be found in the WordPress plugins repository.
Documentation about Foundation can be found here: http://foundation.zurb.com/learn/about.html
