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On the DataTables blog you will find news, announcements and tutorials about DataTables and its suite of extensions.

Latest posts

17th Aug 2025

By Allan Jardine -

Editor 2.5 and ColumnControl 1.1

I'm delighted to announce the side-by-side release of Editor 2.5.0 and ColumnControl 1.1.0. Both are progression releases, building on the solid foundation of what has gone before. They each introduce new features as well as general improvements and fixes. In this post, I'll cover the main new features.

Server-side processing

First, let's look at why these two pieces of software were released at the same time - ColumnControl now has support for server-side processing, and the Editor server-side libraries have full support for this mode.

If you aren't yet familiar with server-side processing in DataTables, it is a mode of operation where the majority of data operations are handed off to a server-side program (typically an SQL engine), which is optimised for search, ordering and paging, replying with only the data to be displayed for each page. This allows the table to readily display millions of rows without needing to send the full data set to the client-side.

30th Jul 2025

By Allan Jardine -

Outage - post incident review

On 29th July 2025, the DataTables.net site had a major outage as a result of an attack. This took out the main site with its examples and documentation, the support forum, and the sub-domains, including, most importantly, the DataTables CDN.

Digging into such an event, when something has gone so wrong, is not a fun thing to do, but it is important for me to do so I can learn what I can do better in future, for you so you can understand what happened and the challenges faced, and for the community so we can try to stop this sort of thing happening in future.

Image showing the bandwidth drop

18th Jun 2025

By Allan Jardine -

Landing page demo breakdown

The DataTables landing page has an example table that demonstrates a range of the capabilities that the software has. The initialisation code for this example is quite interesting and I thought it would be instructive to do a line-by-line breakdown explaining the options used and the decisions behind the use of each option.

In this post, I'll work through a number of iterations, building up the full example and explaining each step as part of an implementation process. While this post will cover a lot of the basics of DataTables, touching on installation and initialisation, it is not intended to be a Javascript from first principles post. I'll assume you know how to use querySelector, addEventListener, what objects are, etc.

Goals

As with all landing page demos, the goal here is to quickly show some of what DataTables is capable of, look attractive, be functional and also approachable. As such there is a balance to be struck between the wide range of options that DataTables and its extensions provide and not overwhelming those new to the software.

Based on that I've elected to use a table which:

Uses the core DataTables features
- Paging and page length
- Search
- Ordering
- Table summary
- Localise data display
Is "responsive" - i.e. automatically adjusts the number of columns in the table based on the screen width so it works well on mobile and desktop screens)
Provides some advanced search options.