WordPress custom options storing?

Question

I have a theme with around 500 custom options, their code looks like this:

<form method="post" action="options.php">
   <?php wp_nonce_field('update-options'); ?>
   <input type="text" " value="<?php echo get_option('option1'); ?>" />
   <input type="text" " value="<?php echo get_option('option2'); ?>" />        
   <input type="hidden" name="action" value="update" />
   <input type="hidden" name="page_options" value="option1,option2" />
   <input type="submit" value="<?php _e('Save Changes') ?>" />
</form>

I guess they're all stored in wp_options table.

The point is, I'm unable to save this data, every time i export/import Wordpress settings these custom options values disappear, changing theme also wipes them out.

How to fix that?

Answer 1

WordPress is built to import and export content. As such, there is no built-in way to import or export settings.

Some theme and plugin authors, however, have built tools into their systems that import/export XML files that their systems can use store options.

A great example is WordPress SEO by Yoast. Not only can you import/export settings from his plugin, but you can import settings from other systems, too. Yoast's plugin exports an .ini file that contains options and settings in the following format:

; This is a settings export file for the WordPress SEO plugin by Yoast.com - http://yoast.com/wordpress/seo/

[wpseo]
version = "1.0.3"

[wpseo_indexation]
0 = 

[wpseo_permalinks]

[wpseo_titles]

[wpseo_rss]

[wpseo_internallinks]

[wpseo_xml]

This is just one example. My personal recommendation is that you add a button or other trigger that saves your 500 or so custom options in an XML file. You'll have to write this yourself, but it should be fairly straight-forward.

You can then import this same XML file, parse it, and restore your options. Once again, something you'll have to write, but do-able.

If you want to use XML, I recommend you read up on the DOMDocument object that ships with PHP5. It makes creating/reading/manipulating XML documents via PHP pretty easy.