Posted by pwc51 on

I have seen various comments about experimenting with tables but have failed dismally! There are a couple of key concepts that I am failing on - any information on one or, preferably, both would be appreciated.

1. How do I add a row to an existing table? When I right click on a cell / row it will not allow me to increase the number of rows.

2. I have tried to create another table and in the editor the columns in both the original table and my new table are aligned - however when I look at the published page the alignment is all over the place and does not look like the page when undergoing the edit. Please how do I force the same column widths?

 

2: Re: Table Management (response to 1)
Posted by Voice Admin on

Hi,

Sorry you've been having trouble with tables. For what it's worth, I never find tables very satisfactory for anything unless what I really want is a table of data!

I'd recommend that you don't use tables for any layout purpose. Only use them if you have a table of data to show. For layout there are much better ways of doing things.

The key reason is that the editor has a habit of putting fixed widths (in pixels) into tables, which then breaks the layout if you view it on a small screen such as a mobile phone.

If you ensure the table has no fixed width, and use the table to layout content side by side, then again on a small screen you probably end up with problems as the colunms will be so narrow. What you'd really want is side by side on a large screen, but content/images flowing underneath on a narrow screen.

If you just want to float an image around some text, then you can use the editor to set right/left justification of the image. The text will then float next to it, but go underneath if it's narrow.

Some more complex layouts will require you editing the HTML directly. This isn't actually too scary, and we can help you do this. It does give you much more flexibility for how things lay out on different size screens.

It could also be that if there are common layout patterns that people use, then we could create suitable includelets to make this easier. For example you can already use the Custom includelet to lay out a block of text with an image next to it, which then has the text flowing underneath when narrow.

If you could let us know which page you're working on then we can advise accordingly!

Thanks

Joe - Voice Admin