ClassicPress Plugin Development: Load Options with Defaults

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.