Month: July 2021

This post is part of the ClassicPress Plugin Development series in which I am going to look at both best practice for developing plugins and how I approach some requirements as well as some of the functions I commonly use.

Over the last couple of posts, I’ve taken a look at saving and loading options and how to load options with defaults. The defaults in the last post was a single dimension array, but you can also do the same with multi dimensional arrays using a ustom recursive parse of the arrays.

The below is an example of loading options with multi dimensional defaults from my Widget Announcements plugin:

/**
 * Get options including defaults.
 *
 * @since 1.1.0
 *
 */
function azrcrv_wa_get_option($option_name){
 
	$defaults = array(
						'widget' => array(
											'width' => 300,
											'height' => 300,
										),
						'to-twitter' => array(
												'integrate' => 0,
												'tweet' => 0,
												'retweet' => 0,
												'retweet-prefix' => 'ICYMI:',
												'tweet-format' => '%t %h',
												'tweet-time' => '10:00',
												'retweet-time' => '16:00',
												'use-featured-image' => 1,
											),
						'toggle-showhide' => array(
												'integrate' => 0,
											),
					);

	$options = get_option($option_name, $defaults);

	$options = azrcrv_wa_recursive_parse_args($options, $defaults);

	return $options;

}

/**
 * Recursively parse options to merge with defaults.
 *
 * @since 1.1.0
 *
 */
function azrcrv_wa_recursive_parse_args( $args, $defaults ) {
	$new_args = (array) $defaults;

	foreach ( $args as $key => $value ) {
		if ( is_array( $value ) && isset( $new_args[ $key ] ) ) {
			$new_args[ $key ] = azrcrv_wa_recursive_parse_args( $value, $new_args[ $key ] );
		}
		else {
			$new_args[ $key ] = $value;
		}
	}

	return $new_args;
}

This post is part of the ClassicPress Plugin Development series in which I am going to look at both best practice for developing plugins and how I approach some requirements as well as some of the functions I commonly use.

In the last post I covered saving and loading options in a ClassicPress plugin. When you create a plugin with options you will want to provide defaults to be used before the user makes any changes to the settings; this both allows for basic operation of the plugin and avoids unset option errors.

The get_option function does allow for defaults to be passed, but this will only work if there are no options; it will not work effectively if new options are added to the plugin. This can be handled using the wp_parse_args function which merges user defined arguments into defaults array.

wp_parse_args( string|array|object $args, array $defaults = array() )
Parameters
$args (string|array|object) (Required)  Value to merge with $defaults.

$defaults (array) (Optional) Array that serves as the defaults.
Default value: array()
Return
(array) Merged user defined values with defaults.

The below is an example of loading options with defaults from my Comment Validator plugin:

/**
 * Get options including defaults.
 *
 * @since 1.2.0
 *
 */
function azrcrv_cv_get_option($option_name){
 
	$defaults = array(
						'min_length' => 10,
						'max_length' => 500,
						'mod_length' => 250,
						'prevent_unreg_using_reg_name' => 1,
						'use_network' => 1,
					);

	$options = get_option($option_name, $defaults);

	$options = wp_parse_args($options, $defaults);

	return $options;

}

The above example works when the default options is single level. If the options are multilevel, these need to be handled differently; I will cover this in the next post in this series.

This post is part of the ClassicPress Plugin Development series in which I am going to look at both best practice for developing plugins and how I approach some requirements as well as some of the functions I commonly use.

When developing a plugin, most of them will have settings which need to be saved ad recalled. There are functions available in ClassicPress which you can use to do this:

get_option

update_option

If your plugin contains multiple options, then best practice would be to store these in an array within one option rather than each option stored individually.

The get_option is used to load options from the database:

get_option( string $option, mixed $default = false )
Parameters
$option (string) (Required) Name of option to retrieve. Expected to not be SQL-escaped.

$default (mixed) (Optional) Default value to return if the option does not exist.
Default value: false
Return
(mixed) Value set for the option.

The below is an example of loading options from my SMTP plugin:

$options = get_option( 'azrcrv-smtp' );

The update_option function is used to save options:

update_option( string $option, mixed $value, string|bool $autoload = null )
Parameters
$option (string) (Required) Option name. Expected to not be SQL-escaped.

$value (mixed) (Required) Option value. Must be serializable if non-scalar. Expected to not be SQL-escaped.

$autoload (string|bool) (Optional) Whether to load the option when ClassicPress starts up. For existing options, $autoload can only be updated using update_option() if $value is also changed. Accepts 'yes'|true to enable or 'no'|false to disable. For non-existent options, the default value is 'yes'.
Default value: null
Return
(bool) False if value was not updated and true if value was updated.

The below is an example of saving options from my SMTP plugin:

update_option( 'azrcrv-smtp', $options );