Building an options page for a plugin can be a daunting prospect – you want to build it in a way that works for your plugin, but also so that it works well within the WordPress UI. Many plugin authors get this painfully wrong and build incredibly unfriendly options pages that look terrible and really don’t fit into the WordPress dashboard design at all.
After putting loads of work into refactoring Seriously Simple Podcasting for the v2.0 release, I’ve developed a single class that will help you to create a versatile and user-friendly options page for your plugin that fits neatly into the WordPress dashboard. All you need to do is add this class to your plugin and modify the array of settings to handle the data that your plugin needs.
This isn’t a tutorial post, so I’m not going to walk you through this step by step, but if you use the class below you can create a WordPress options page with every type of field possible with almost no effort on your part. The field types that this class can create are:
- Text field
- Password field
- Secret text field (where the saved data is not displayed on the page)
- Text area
- Single checkbox
- Multiple checkboxes
- Select box
- Multiple select box
- Radio buttons
- Number field
- Colour picker (using WordPress’ built-in colour picker script)
- Image upload (that saves the image to your site’s media library)
I have included demo fields in the class so you can see how each field type works and what parameters you need to define for each field type – all you need to do is delete these fields and create your own.
The class uses all the WordPress Settings API functions, so it does things in the “correct” way. It also includes a mini-navigation that uses Javascript to show & hide the relevant sections.
You will find the class, along with its associated Javascript file below, but if you want to see it all in action in the context of a full plugin you can check out my WordPress Plugin Template that includes this same code. For a quick overview of what the resulting options page will look like, here’s a handy screenshot (click to enlarge):

Here is the class in its entirety along with the relevant Javascript and include code:
Once you have added all this code you will find the new options page in the dashboard menu by going to Settings > Plugin Settings.
The options that are saved from this page use the $settings_base
variable in the class (in this case, ‘wpt_
‘)followed by the id field of each setting for their name. So the option name for the first field would be ‘wpt_text_field
‘, which you can fetch using get_option( 'wpt_text_field' );
.
If you can think of any other field types that you think should be included in this class then let me know in the comments.
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