Hi,
thanks for your post, and sorry for the trouble.
Yes, WordPress themes will have to fulfill three basic requirements here:
There must be a call to the wp_head(); function right before the HTML </head> tag (likely in a file “header.php”), there must be a call to wp_footer(); right before the HTML </body> tag (likely in a file “footer.php”), and the theme must use the the_content(); template tag function to display the post/page content (likely in an index.php or content.php file).
Those three functions guarantee that the necessary JS files and calls can be embedded properly.
Now, there might be other JS issues on the page that make the browser stop executing JavaScript, so that the sorting would also not work. To find those, it would be good if you could post a link to the page with the table where this problem happens, so that I can take a direct look. Thanks!
Regards,
Tobias