You have come to love how easy it is to add attractive tables to your website with TablePress. And, as a user of TablePress Extensions, you already know some of the great additional features that are possible.
You might now have seen a warning message in your TablePress admin dashboard: This page explains what’s coming with the update to TablePress 3 later this year, why this is necessary, and what options you have.
In short:
For technical reasons, several already retired “TablePress Extension” plugins will stop working with TablePress 3, coming later this year. You can keep their features by upgrading to a TablePress Premium plan.
What will to happen
With TablePress 3, planned for the fourth quarter of 2024, several already-retired TablePress Extensions will stop working. Due to necessary technical changes in a code library, their old and incompatible code will no longer work. Continue reading below to understand what TablePress Extensions are and why these changes are necessary.
If you are using any of the TablePress Extensions listed below, it is possible that features will simply stop working or that your site visitors will see error messages.
What you can do now
To prevent issues on your site from continuing to use affected and retired TablePress Extensions, you have two options:
Option 1: Upgrade to TablePress Pro or TablePress Max
To continue using the features of the no-longer-working TablePress Extensions, upgrade to a premium plan of TablePress. These bring up-to-date and highly improved versions of affected features, with a modern integration into the TablePress user interface, making them easier to use and manage. You won’t have to update multiple different plugins anymore and you can get rid of error-prone Shortcode parameters. And no worries, upgrading is easy and straightforward: All tables, options, settings, etc. will continue to work automatically!
And the best:
Save 30% by using the promo code THANKYOU30 during the checkout process!
After choosing a TablePress Premium plan, you are fully protected by our 100% No-Risk Double Guarantee! If you don’t like TablePress over the next 30 days, we’ll happily refund 100% of your money. No questions asked.
Option 2: Continue with the free TablePress Basic version
If you choose not to upgrade to TablePress Pro or TablePress Max, but want to prevent any issues on your site, you would either need to deactivate the affected TablePress Extension plugins and lose their features, or you would need to keep using the latest version of the TablePress 2.x branch. However, this version will no longer receive updates once TablePress 3 is available, which includes security, stability, and compatibility updates (e.g. when new WordPress versions are released). Therefore, upgrading to TablePress 3 is recommended.
Why these changes are necessary
Some background: “TablePress Extensions” are small custom plugins that add extra functionality and features to TablePress, without being part of the plugin itself. While this can be a nice approach to extend TablePress with one-off features, it can also be a cumbersome and error-prone method. These additional plugins need to be updated manually and separately, creating dependency problems, they are not directly integrated into the TablePress user interface, and more.
To make using their functionality easier, the features of many Extensions were directly integrated into the premium versions of TablePress, which have been available since December of 2022, when TablePress 2.0 was released. For most of them, it’s no longer necessary to deal with Shortcode parameters, as their settings have been directly integrated into the TablePress user interface. As everything is in one common codebase now, maintenance and stability has also improved greatly.
Due to that integration into the main TablePress plugin, the affected TablePress Extensions were retired over one and a half year ago. This means that these Extensions will no longer receive updates or support, but that they can still be used as long as they are working. I stand by my promise to not make any changes in TablePress to break Extensions on purpose!
However, with TablePress 3, slated for the fourth quarter of 2024, several of the already-retired TablePress Extensions will stop working. The reason is a major update to an internal code library that TablePress uses as the foundation for the table features for site visitors. This allows for great new features and improvements: TablePress tables will be more accessible, e.g. to site visitors that use only keyboard navigation or text-to-speech software for navigating around a web page. In many countries, legislation requires that websites improve accessibility in the next few years, which is why holding back on that update is not reasonable.
Unfortunately, due to technical changes in that code library, old and incompatible code will no longer work. Several retired TablePress Extensions use such outdated code and they will no longer be updated. Due to that, it is possible that features will simply stop working or that there will be error messages on the screen.
Affected TablePress Extensions that will break
Here is an overview of affected TablePress Extensions and what is expected to break when using them after upgrading to TablePress 3:
- Alphabet Search: The button styling will disappear and leave unstyled content.
- Buttons: A JavaScript error might interfere with other features of a page.
- ColumnFilter: The feature will no longer work and filter dropdowns or input fields will no longer show.
- ColumnFilterWidgets: The feature will no longer work and and filter dropdowns will no longer show.
- FixedColumns: The feature will no longer work and columns will no longer be fixed to the screen when scrolling horizontally.
- FixedHeader: In some cases, a JavaScript error might interfere with other features of a page.
- Row Details: The feature will no longer work and rows can no longer be expanded or collapsed.
- Row Group: The feature will no longer work and rows will no longer be grouped.
- Responsive Tables: The “Collapse” mode will no longer work. The “Stack” mode will break due to misapplied styling. The “Flip” and “Scroll” modes are not affected.
Summary:
For technical reasons, several already retired “TablePress Extension” plugins will stop working with TablePress 3, coming later this year. You can keep their features by upgrading to a TablePress Premium plan.
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