Admin Columns 6.3 Released

At the end of 2022, we released Admin Columns 6.0. A few days ago we arrived at 6.3. Time to highlight some of the improvements we made, and how you can use them to make your (WordPress) day a bit more productive. If you, after reading this, want to know every detail that has changed: read our changelog.

Support for WooCommerce HPOS

Starting from version 8.2, WooCommerce offers an improved way to store orders called HPOS (High-Performance Order Storage). It stores WooCommerce orders in custom tables, which makes loading everything that involves orders a lot faster. Especially on the front end of your website, you can expect quite an improvement in performance.

For Admin Columns users who want to use HPOS, there is good news: We have been able to port all WooCommerce columns and features to HPOS. Especially on bulk operations like Sorting, Filtering, Bulk editing, and Exporting you can expect a nice performance improvement!

At the time of writing, HPOS is not enabled by default in WooCommerce. If performance in WooCommerce is a bottleneck right now, we can recommend enabling HPOS in WooCommerce. Since you can run HPOS and the current storage in sync, there is even an easy way to discard the HPOS data if you want to wait a bit longer before migrating. We wrote a more in-depth article on HPOS and Admin Columns if you want to know more about HPOS.

Custom Formats for Conditional Formatting

Conditional Formatting allows you to format the values in the columns based on conditions you set. The formats we offer are very basic, but based on the WordPress notice colors, and should work for most use cases. Since we cannot predict all other use cases, we have added a simple filter that allows you to change or add new formats: acp/conditional_format/formats

This is how it works: Every format adds a class attribute and we then assign CSS properties to this class. One of the two available properties is the background property, which allows you to tweak most of the appearance except the color of the text. That is why color is the other property available. (If you know what you are doing, you can of course assign other CSS properties yourself. But be aware that some other properties can also change the size of the content, and that might break the UI.)

The code for using the filter could look like this:

add_filter('acp/conditional_format/formats', function ($formats) {
    $formats['success_pattern'] = [
        'background'       => '#EE4E34 repeating-linear-gradient(-45deg,rgba(255,255,255,.3),rgba(255,255,255,.3) 5px,transparent 5px,transparent 10px);',
        'color'            => '#FFF',
    ];

    $formats['cherry_bubblgum'] = [
        'background'       => '#F7C5CC',
        'color'            => '#CC313D',
    ];

    return $formats;
});

If we added a few more formats, the result would be these extra formats to choose from:

As you can see, we added a few patterns as well. So creating very accessible formats that have a high contract or use no color but patterns instead is all possible now.

Due to how WordPress renders columns, Conditional Formatting only works on columns created with Admin Columns. Most original WordPress columns also have an Admin Columns variant, which often has a few more handy options than the original WordPress column. For example: you can create an Admin Columns column for the Post Title, mark it as the “Primary Column” and you hardly see the difference. A little workaround, but it even might be a win-win.

Table Views as tabs

For those who rely a lot on Table Views, this is one to start using. It allows you to always have your Table Views visible and clickable at all times:

You can switch between the drop-down menu (which is the default) and the tabs menu on the settings page, so pick what has your preference.

File Storage: Saved Filters and i18n

If you are using, or looking into using File Storage, these new features might be of interest to you. Global Saved Filters are now also saved to a file, so you can configure them locally and ship them to production/share them with your team. And, if you also want to translate your settings: there is a new filter that allows you to do just that: acp/storage/file/directory/i18n_text_domain

If you supply a WordPress text domain to this filter, settings will saved as __( 'setting', 'text domain' ) instead of 'setting'. With WordPress and Admin Columns being translated to quite a few languages, this can help you to bring a complete i18n solution for Admin Columns.

ACF Groups list table supported

Our integration for ACF (Advanced Custom Fields) supported just about anything ACF had to offer, except for the “Groups” list table. The ACF Groups are also stored in a Post Type and as such you can now manage it with Admin Columns. The option to filter is especially handy when you have a lot of groups and want to know which group is shown where:

Preview for Audio/Video columns

On the Media list table, you can now preview your audio and video files directly from the list table.

Media Library Assistant integration

The MLA (Media Library Assistant) plugin and Admin Columns have been supporting each other for some time now, but now there is an official integration that supports most of the MLA columns. So, if you are using MLA and want the whole Admin Columns experience such as Sorting, Filtering, Exporting, and, Editing: this is for you.

Closing Remarks

We hope you like the improvements for Admin Columns over the last few months. We’ll continue to work on new features and improvements, in the meantime, we always like feedback and feature requests. Have a good one!