Tabbed theme options query about add_settings_section callback function

Question

I have been building a tabbed option page based on some tutorials I found, using the settings API. Here is the code http://pastebin.com/bbSnhFP5 . It's all actually working fine for me but it's not ideal and I'm sure there's a better way around it.

The problem is that when I used this tutorial as a base and adapted it to use add_settings_section() and add_settings_field() calls, I ended up with code which used register_setting() (as opposed to perhaps add_theme_page()) to make the distinction between the tabs ( this is the way the tutorial did it ). This meant that I had to use do_settings_fields() to print the fields instead of do_settings_sections() because do_settings_sections() prints out the entire page of options (as defined by add_theme_page()) on every tab.

The end result of this is that while I need to have the add_settings_section() calls ( because I'm using do_settings_section()) and therefore I need to have callbacks for them, the callbacks cant actually be made to do anything because as far as I know the only way to print out these callbacks is to use do_settings_sections() which I cant use, so it seems like I'm missing something.

As a sort of hack I have used a switch statement to allow me to put some text at the start of each page but I feel there must be a better way of doing this and some way of allowing multiple sections per tab.

Can anyone add anything?

Answer 1

You only need one register_setting() call. The rest can be handled internally. I wrote a Settings API tutorial that explains how to do so.

Without delving too deeply into the code from the tutorial you linked, just based on the screenshot it appears that the Digital Raindrops code bypasses the standard, WordPress core admin UI to do something different with the sections within each page tab.