I wanted a fairly simple way of showing some data in tables on our site. I wanted alternate row colours ("zebra") for ease of reading, and ideally I wanted sortable columns and a rudimentary search facility. This extension does all of that surprisingly well. The data didn't need to be editable from the frontend, but this is a bonus. I agree the methodolgy is a bit quirky and obscure at first - in effect you just set up the data repository in the backend and unless you're importing data (via csv), everything to do with data is done via the frontend. In essence, you do more via the frontend than you expect to, so there's a bit of switching from one to the other! To ease this, as well as the "default view" menu links, I set up extra menus to "administrate" with appropriate limited permissions to save time. Once set up and running, these can largely be removed.
I had a problem with the tables displaying in IE7 (which may also apply to other IE versions) where it was ignoring the column width sent by the code. It appears this falls into the trap of well-known IE7 non-compliance "nasties" (around nested tables). I've fixed it (I think) by adding a "width: 100%;" to the #etetable-tform ID in the eventtablecss.css file. Apart from saying "thanks" for such a great extension, I'm posting this mainly in case anyone else has a similar problem. It may save a few hours (days?) of research!
