Table Creation Wizard

The wizard is a 5-step guided flow for creating a new table. It covers source selection, connection, column picking, and display options — and hands you a ready-to-use shortcode at the end. It is the fastest path from zero to a working table.

How to open the wizard

Go to WP Admin → TableCrafter → Create with Wizard. This is a separate entry point from the standard table builder. The wizard opens full-screen in the admin area and tracks your progress across five named steps shown in a progress bar at the top.

You can navigate back to any completed step by clicking its label in the progress bar. Moving back discards changes made in later steps — the wizard will ask you to confirm before going backwards past a connection step.

Step 1 — Data Source

The first screen shows a grid of source cards. Click one to select it; the card gains a highlighted border. The available sources are:

Only one source can be selected at a time. Click Next to advance. If no card is selected, the Next button is disabled.

Step 2 — Connect

The connection screen adapts to the source you selected. The two most commonly used paths are JSON/REST API and Gravity Forms.

JSON / REST API

Enter the URL of any JSON endpoint or file. Three additional fields are available:

• Auth headers (optional) — one header per line in Key: Value format. Bearer tokens go here as Authorization: Bearer your-token-here. These headers are sent with both the test request and every live table fetch.
• Data path (optional) — a dot-separated path to navigate into a nested JSON response, e.g. products.items. Leave blank if your JSON is a top-level array.

Click Test connection to verify the URL. The wizard sends a request to the endpoint through a WordPress server-side proxy (so CORS is not a concern) and reports one of three outcomes:

• Success — shows a live preview of the detected columns and the first 5 rows.
• Auth error (401/403) — the URL is reachable but credentials are missing or wrong. Add or correct your auth header.
• Unreachable — the URL could not be fetched. Check the URL spelling and whether the server is accessible from your host.

Gravity Forms

A dropdown lists every active Gravity Form on your site. Select the form whose entries you want to display and click Next. No test connection step is needed here since the data is already local.

Other sources

Airtable, Notion, Google Sheets, and WooCommerce each show their own credential or configuration fields on this screen. Refer to the relevant data source doc page for details on what each expects.

Step 3 — Columns

This step shows every field detected from your source as a labelled checkbox. All fields are checked by default. Uncheck any field you do not want to appear as a column in the table.

Two bulk controls sit above the list: Select all and Deselect all. These operate on the full field list regardless of scroll position.

The order of columns in the table matches the order fields appear in this list. Column reordering is available in the full builder after the wizard completes — the wizard does not support drag-to-reorder at this stage.

Step 4 — Display

Three toggle options control the initial display configuration:

All of these options can be changed later in the full builder or directly in the shortcode attributes. The wizard settings just set the starting values.

Step 5 — Review & Create

The final step shows a summary of all your choices: source type, connection URL or form name, selected column count, and the display options you toggled. Review the summary and click Create Table.

The wizard saves the table configuration via AJAX. When the save completes, two things appear:

• The shortcode for your new table, e.g. [tablecrafter id="12"], with a Copy button next to it.
• A Customize in builder → link that opens the new table directly in the advanced builder, where you can configure column formatting, sorting defaults, export options, and everything else not covered by the wizard.

Copy the shortcode and paste it into any page, post, widget, or PHP template using do_shortcode().

Bearer token authentication for JSON sources

Many internal and third-party APIs require a Bearer token. In the wizard's Step 2 auth headers field, enter:

Authorization: Bearer your-token-here

If you need additional headers alongside the token, add them on separate lines:

Authorization: Bearer your-token-here
X-API-Version: 2
Accept: application/json

The headers textarea accepts one header per line in standard Key: Value format. The wizard sends these with the Test connection call so you can confirm auth works before advancing to column selection. They are also stored with the table configuration and sent with every live fetch.

Nested JSON: using the data path field

If your API response wraps its records inside an object rather than returning a top-level array, use the Data path field to tell the wizard where to look. For example, given this response:

{
  "meta": { "total": 48 },
  "products": {
    "items": [
      { "id": 1, "name": "Widget A", "price": 12.99 },
      ...
    ]
  }
}

Enter products.items in the data path field. The wizard walks each segment of the path and finds the array to use as table rows. If the path is wrong, the Test connection preview will show a "path not found" error indicating exactly which segment failed.

Wizard vs. the full builder

The wizard covers the most common setup decisions. Some things are only configurable in the full builder after creation:

Use the wizard to get a working table quickly, then open it in the builder to refine the details.