I've been working on making a set of extensions to make a table editing helper, which I'm tentatively calling TableEdit. The help page for the prototype is at:

http://colimod.org/colipedia/index.php/Special:TableEdit

...with screen captures!

The basic idea is that you can put <newTableEdit/> in your markup, and an extension will replace it on save with a link to a special page that can create the table by adding and deleting columns and rows. These are stored in an external mysql db with two tables. One keeps track of the tables in each page and the other keeps track of the content of each row. The row data is just a string of values delimited by '||' so it can be dropped right into the table markup. In the prototype, you can put a list of column headings between <newTableEdit>list</newTableEdit>, or you can specify a location for a list of column headings in a Template page.

Individual rows can be editable by all or only by the creator and admins. This doesn't stop editing in the page itself unless you combine it with ProtectSection or some other protection mechanism.

What I don't have working yet is: - Sorting - Inserting between existing rows and columns - Parsing the data back out of the wiki text.

and as usual, the code could probably be cleaned up a lot. I'll try to post it to mediawiki as experimental this weekend, but I wanted people to see the doc page.

Jim

p.s. The wiki it's on doesn't allow anonymous registration or editing, so you won't be able to test drive it in place. ===================================== Jim Hu Associate Professor Dept. of Biochemistry and Biophysics 2128 TAMU Texas A&M Univ. College Station, TX 77843-2128 979-862-4054