News

Passing The Torch

Hey Everyone,

For the past 10 years it has been my privilege to be the creator and maintainer of Tabulator.

Tabulator has been a labour of love for me, it has been a long standing dream of mine to be able to build a library that would be able to give back to the community and that other developers would enjoy using. Tabulator started out as me tinkering about with my first attempt at building a jQuery plugin back in Oct 2016, and to see how it has grown over the years has been astounding, with around 7 Million downloads a year at this point!

Building this library has been my passion, and I have loved working with the community, but sadly these days I find my focus split in too many different directions, and have been struggling to find the time to give Tabulator the energy it deserves.

To help keep the Tabulator library and community alive, I'm happy to announce that today I am passing the torch over to new maintainers to take Tabulator into its next phase. From today I will be passing over responsibility for Tabulator to the fantastic @rathboma and @azmy60 who have been committed contributors to the library for many years and use it as a core part of their excellent Beekeeper Studio project. As you will have seen from the issues list, they have been actively stepping in for a while now to manage things and have been GitHub Collaborators for a long time.

I want to say a massive thank you to the whole Tabulator community, you have driven me to push my boundaries, taught me so many things, helped guide this project, contributed so many great ideas and supported each other over the years, and Tabulator wouldn’t have become the amazing tool it is today without you all.

A special shout out as well to @surfNicolas for all his amazing work maintaining the Tabulator community on Discord! His hard work has really built the sense of community and allowed everyone to connect and support each other.

So what does the future look like for Tabulator, well first off there is nothing to worry about, it will still stay MIT licensed and will run the same as it currently does, it is just a different group of die-hard Tabulator fans running the show now. It is going to take a couple of weeks for us to transfer all the systems access etc. and I'm sure you can expect to start seeing the release frequency pickup again as they take the reins. In the long run from discussions with @rathboma they plan to keep the website and discord and other community functions up and running and to add a host of new services to expand Tabulator even further, but I will leave that up for them to discuss with the community.

I'm still going to be a member of the Tabulator community, occasionally contributing PR’s and getting involved in chat, there is just a new captain at the helm.

Building Tabulator and this community has been a dream come true for me, and i'm so excited to see where @rathboma takes things next.

Thank you to everyone for all your hard work and support over the years.

Happy Tabulating!

Oli :)

17/05/2026

Version 4.0 Comming Soon

I have begun work on the mammoth task of building Tabulator 4.0, and thought I would give you some tasters of what is to come.

The updates will include:

  • Tabulator will be free of core dependencies, no more need for JQuery!
  • A jQuery wrapper for those that want to keep using jQuery with Tabulator the way it is
  • Promise based architecture to make it easier to trigger actions after a table has rendered
  • Source refactored to ES8
  • Virtual DOM efficiency and speed improvements
  • Overhaul of the extensions system to make it even easier to use
  • New minimal core.js build that will only included the very basic table functionality to allow for ultra low code footprint
  • Enhaced clipboard functionality with style copy
  • Cell level selection (select ranges of cells)
  • Filter Enhancements
  • Sorter Enhancements
  • Formatter Enhancements
  • Much Much More...

In a couple of weeks I will be looking for some people to alpha test some of the new functionality and give some feedback on what they think. Check the news section in a couple of weeks for details on how to sign up.

Im hoping to get the release out by the end of July, so keep your eyes peeled for more news.

Keep on Tabulating!

Oli :)

24/06/2018