I have seen and used plugins that added anywhere from ten to thirty new records to the options table, and a correspondent of mine reports that he has encountered a plugin that, upon activation, adds a whopping 140 new records to wp_options. Egad! There has to be a better way!

There is a better way. With a few simple changes to your code, plugin authors can put all the various settings into an array, and enter that array as a single record in the options table. This article will show you how.

On this site I use a plugin called ShrinkyLink. It performs the straightforward but useful function of shortening long URLs to a specified length, or replacing the link text entirely with a specified string. It was created by Andrew Rader, but as far as I can tell his web site no longer exists. For the purposes of this article, it has a number of good qualities:

• It inserts 10 separate records into the WordPress options table
• It is not likely to see further updates from the original author
• It is useful and thus worthy of updating
• The original author was kind enough to release it under the GPL2 license

The last version of ShrinkyLink was 0.2, released in 2006. Today we’re going to begin the rehabilitation of this plugin and create a version 0.3 that stores all its settings in a single array.

I’m going to split this into multiple sections:

1. How to set and retrieve settings using arrays
2. Upgrading your plugin’s Admin Screen form to use an array
3. Upgrading existing settings from multiple records to a single array

Let’s get to it.

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