Thanks for that. I learned the array tip from studying the Subscribe To Comments plugin and thought it was genius.

1. while fetching the rows from the options table, don’t forget to maybe_unserialize() your option values!

2. And the whole point of this: avoid doing too much get_option() calls.

Greets

I’ve been working on my own ecommerce plugin now for almost a year…

It’s operational in v1 @ http://www.wenskaartenshop.be, v2 is now in test @ http://testground.wenskaartenshop.be, excuse the “spam”, but I’d love to hear some feedback from fellow WP lovers

Now u can imagine an elaborate plugin like my ecommerce plugin requires an extensive list of options.

The technique I used on my first plugin (WP Google Positioner) was to use 1 option array for all my plugins’ options, like described above.

With my ecommerce plugin (which houses 8 widgets, full shopping cart and checkout, product catalog (with the new WP taxonomy system which I used for my “product” type) the full option list is about 150 items.

Using a serialized TEXT (mysql) field was not a serious method to go with, as some option-values contain pieces of HTML code of about 500-1000 chars.

As I have yet to cover the caching part of my plugin, my concern also lies with the amount of database queries I have to run on each page-load.
As the product catalog is very extensive and has a “custom field” feature, and some categories contain more then 100 products, simple SQL selects would not cover the whole load without having to use too much queries.

So I come to the point of my little story (I still hope to receive some feedback) :

If you would need a large array of options, a technique you *could* use is:
1. Prefix all your plugins’ options with something like ‘plugin_’
2. Do a simple SQL: SELECT * FROM wp_options WHERE option_name LIKE ‘plugin_%’
3. fetch the results and put in your plugin option class-property or variable.

Hope to be of any assistance,

Kim

I love your idea of using areas instead of more entries into wp_options — too many things just take that “option” for granted.

In a recent plugin we had done we had to store about 400 variables, and chose to write them to a .txt file vs the wp_options. but your array idea might be a better choice.