If you’re like me, you’ve probably needed to create nice looking tables for your WordPress hosted site but haven’t found a good shortcode for it. Well, today’s your lucky day (and mine)!

That’s because I found this post by Kevin Chard. However, I encountered results that weren’t quite favorable:

As you can see, it wasn’t parsing the variables at all. So, I made a few minor adjustments to his code.

I changed the following code:

$Output .=

to:

echo

and instead, concatinated the mixed html and variables in strings, like this:

echo '<td>'.$col.'</td>';

And had glorious results:

Here’s the full code, placed within my theme’s functions.php file:

function simple_table( $atts ) {
    extract( shortcode_atts( array(
        'cols' => 'none',
        'data' => 'none',
    ), $atts ) );
    $cols = explode(',',$cols);
    $data = explode(',',$data);
    $total = count($cols);
    echo '<table><tr class="th">';
    foreach($cols as $col):
        echo '<td>'.$col.'</td>';
    endforeach;
    echo '</tr><tr>';
    $counter = 1;
    foreach($data as $datum):
        echo '<td>'.$datum.'</td>';
        if($counter%$total==0):
            echo '</tr>';
        endif;
        $counter++;
    endforeach;
        echo '</table>';
}
add_shortcode( 'mytable', 'simple_table' );

And, here is the shortcode call from within the WP page:

[mytable cols="name,quantity,price" data="name1,5,2.00,name2,3,3.25"]

You can export comma separated values (CSV) from your excel doc and you only have to separate the top (header) row to ensure the appropriate number of columns are created.

The two drawbacks I see with this shortcode are:

1. Must have equal columns to avoid rolling overflow.
2. Not able to create table cells that span columns or rows.

But it’s a great start.

Update: Kevin noticed the last output call I had inadvertently left in from his code was unnecessary. Thank you for your keen eye to the code, Kevin!

return $output;

Thank you again, Kevin!