ClassicPress Plugin Development: Load and Save Options

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 );