jQuery Tablesorter - column not sorting alphabetically

Question

I'm not sure what's going wrong here. This is the page: http://www.utexas.edu/ssw/cswr/projects/project-list/

The first column sorts, but it isn't returning data in the correct order (alphabetical).

The table itself is being generated by a custom PHP function that pulls info from a WordPress database. I thought that might be the issue, but as you can see the fourth column (End Date) sorts correctly. I also thought it might be the links in the first column that were messing things up, but adding the text-extraction code from this page broke the sorting altogether.

This is the jQuery code I'm current using to call Tablesorter:

<script type="text/javascript" id="js">

   jQuery(document).ready(function($) { 
       $(document).ready(function() {
          // call the tablesorter plugin, the magic happens in the markup
          $("#projectTable").tablesorter({ 
              // pass the headers argument and assing a object 
              //debug: true,
              //sortList: [[0,0]],
              headers: { 
                  0: { 
                  // set the column to sort as text  
                      sorter: 'text',
                  },
                  // assign the secound column (we start counting zero) 
                  1: { 
                      // disable it by setting the property sorter to false 
                      sorter: false,
                  }, 
                  // assign the third column (we start counting zero) 
                  2: { 
                      // disable it by setting the property sorter to false 
                      sorter: false
                  },
                  3: {
                        sorter:'digit'
                  }
              }


          });

               // Works only with plugin modification
                $("#projectTable").bind("sortStart",function(e) { 
                    if( $(e.target).hasClass('header') ) {
                        $("#overlay").show();
                    }
                }).bind("sortEnd",function(e) {
                    if( $(e.target).hasClass('header') ) {
                        $("#overlay").hide();
                    }
                });

         });
    }); 
</script>

Thanks for your help!

Answer 1

The problem is that it's sorting by the URL in the link rather than the text.

You may need to create a custom sort criteria (the textExtraction property) to fix that.

Answer 2

You need to define textExtraction as complex since you have links in the elements.

See: http://tablesorter.com/docs/#options