Day 4 of [c] is here!
- Day 1: Introduction
- Day 2: Creating the different options
- Day 3: Styling the options page
- Day 4: Implementing the options into a theme
Today comes the exciting implementation of our options page that we created yesterday. The first thing to do is to create a new file called get-theme-options.php and save it with your theme files. In this file paste the following:
<?php
//allows the theme to get info from the theme options page
global $options;
foreach ($options as $value) {
if (get_option( $value['id'] ) === FALSE) { $$value['id'] = $value['std']; }
else { $$value['id'] = get_option( $value['id'] ); }
}
?>What it does is it allows us to reference the options we’ve selected in the backend. We need to include it in every file that you want to use theme options, which we can do with the following:
<?php include (TEMPLATEPATH.'/get-theme-options.php'); ?>
Implementing Feedburner
The very first option on our options page was the Feedburner address, where users could input their Feedburner URL and it’ll become the RSS feed. With get-theme-options at the top of our header.php file, to get the contents of the Feedburner field from the options page, it’s just a simple echo. At this point you’ll need the shortname you entered in part two and combine this with the ID for the Feedburner, in our example with a shortname of blt and the feedburner ID of _feedburner, that makes blt_feedburner. Combine that with an echo and you get this:
<?php echo $blt_feedburner;?>
Add this to the RSS link in the header and you’ll get something like this:
Wow thanks for this tutorials. It really helps a lot of designers who doesn’t now how to code like me 🙂 keep up the good work!
Hi Alex,
I had little hiccups placing all the pieces of this tutorial (as I am a newbie to the wordpress development) but once done, it worked like a charm.
Thanks for the great article.
Why is everything so jacked after implementing the code? After day 3 it sent everything everywhere in the admin. Is it compatible with WP 3x ? I’ve not changed a thing from the code you have given through the tutorial… I copied and pasted.
Does the stuff included in Day 4 still work with WordPress 3.x? I have everything up to this point working, but I can’t get any of the options to display properly, and I’m not getting any error messages to help me out.
I am simply trying to display the custom option entered in a text box in the footer. get-theme-options.php exists, and header.php, index.php and footer.php all include . Thanks,
Nick
Hi,
I found your series and went through it a couple of times.
I’m implementing it now – and get the following error:
Warning: Invalid argument supplied for foreach() … /get-theme-options.php on line 4
Does anyone has an idea what could be the problem?
Thanks.
I have the same problem. My assumption is that the newest version of WordPress does not work with the get-theme-options.php code. I don’t know enough PHP to recode that page, but hopefully someone else does because this is my go-to code for theme options pages for clients.
Many many thanks for the great tutorial! Also many thanksto the community here, the comments were really helpful. I am currently working on my own SEO WP theme and adding an options page has just gotten soooo easy 🙂
Just wanted to sincerely thank you. I am new wordpress and in the process of developing an admin page for a theme I am making from scratch. The only problem I had was updating the header links in functions.php like James so graciously pointed out. It’s contributions like this that really help me learn and look forward to one day giving back to the community. Thanks Alex!
Awsome Tutorial! I look forward to adding all kinds of options to my theme. One questions though, when I make changes to the options and click save settings i get a warning that says “You do not have sufficient permissions to access this page.” but the changes are still saved, what might cause this?
Pretty nice,but what happened to day 5?
hello,
i have a problem, when putting html code into the fields in the options page, it all get wrong (mostly with ” and haviing \ before it).
even trying to encode it don’t always solve the problem.
any idea how to solve it?
thanks a lot,
ilan
hi Alex,
i have learn a lot by reading and reading your tutorials this year,
i have add color selectors, nice easing drop downs…the only thing i can’t implement is the wp upload form,
i have add an upload form that works but i can’t get the wp upload box and the url in my input.
can you help me to do this?
or anyone here have done this?
thanks a lot for sharing your knowledge with us!!!
all the best to your life and your upcoming projects:)
I am also having this problem.
When generating a .php css file using
header(“Content-type: text/css”);
include (TEMPLATEPATH.’/get-theme-options.php’);
Nothing happens. When viewing the file individually include errors occur.
If I remove the include line the file loads fine and css is applied.
Does anyone know the solution?
Thank you.
Great tutorial.
Hi Alex, thank you very much for the thorough tut. I read through it a couple times when you published it last year and finally got around to making my own.
I noticed when you adjust the site layout, you do it by making additional stylesheets and including them via if statements in the header. Did you consider filtering the
body_class()function and adding in 3c, 2c and 2cw based on the if statements you wrote? If so, why did you choose the way you did? To me, filtering the class is simpler as it leads to less code duplication among the 3 stylesheets, but I could be missing something.When I wrote this,
body_classdidn’t actually exist (I wrote this a while before publishing), so that’s why I didn’t use it!It’s a good shout though and something that would make a lot of sense doing (now you mention it, I do know of some themes that do it). I’d have to test it out but it seems you’d have to test which has a worse effect on loading times — extra styles inline or a large stylesheet (and body class functions can get fairly big!). For the odd styles,
body_classwould be the way to go, but with a lot of options I’m not so sure.Hi,
Whenever I put a html link (a href) in textarea field it adds \ before every “.
How can I fix that?
When I put
it becomesThanks in advance..
Try stripslashes, it will work 🙂
echo stripslashes($xp_MainAd);[…] Creating An Advanced Options Page in WordPress Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4 […]
Hi Alex,
Great tutorial, I’ve looked at three today and this is by far the easiest to follow.
One suggestion would be to change the blog layout option to ‘select’ rather than offering 3 check boxes and telling the user to only choose one.
Also the download files for day three 404’d my ass 🙂
Other than that a great tutorial and I found it really useful, thanks!
And if you don’t mind, can you please tell me how I can set up a field for uploading a picture file for the blog logo from the Options page? I’ve looked for it everywhere but I can’t seem to find an answer.
and
include (TEMPLATEPATH.’/get-theme-options.php’);
Does get-theme-options.php exist?
Yes it exists.
I seem to be able to read the values in all other php files except for when I insert the code in the style.php and have the header(“Content-type: text/css”); code. Then it just does not recognize? Any suggestions please?
header(“Content-type: text/css”);
This is what I have in the header in the above post (got cut of)
Great tutorial. I do have one question. I am trying to change the background color of the blog using custom options page. I am trying to pass the value of the background color variable to the style.php file. I added a code snippet at the top of the file to include the options. However the CSS is not picking up the value. As you can see the file is being converted to .CSS via code.
body { background: ; background-image:url(images/bg.jpg); color: #000; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; height:100%}
Any advise appreciated.
James
Great stuff works as it should and well explained i’m gonna use this for my upcoming designs thanks 😉
Really nice tutorial. I’m trying to understand it from past few days.
It is working well. I’ve one confusion. How can I change the css style.
I’ve created a style.php file where I have pasted a necessary code and defined text/css type. The only problem is I’m unable to change the style.
Pls help me out with this.
I solved it. I forgot to include style.php file in header file.
One more doubt how can I make a tabbed menu for admin panel?
Like in “General” tab there is an option for general settings. “Header” tab there is a setting for header area and so on…..
UPDATE 2: Scratch all of that. I found that if you leave a space after ?> at the beginning or end of the code it blows it out of the water. Sorry for the multiple posts – I now have a fully functional options page again! 🙂
Steve
Good to hear 🙂
UPDATE: All functions that have a “save” or “submit”, or even logout now go to a blank page. What did I miss?
Thanks
Steve
Hi there – first off this is a great tutorial and I am VERY grateful for the time you’ve spent on this. I am a novice – you’ve saved me a ton of time.
One quick question – when I click “save changes” the updates go live, but I’m left with a blank page. I’m sure this is my mistake, somewhere, but could you point me to where you think the issue might be please?
thanks again.
Steve
Hi Alex! Great tutorial! I’m wondering if you know how to list the authors on this options page? I’d like to feature an author on the home page and let the editor choose it.. any clue?
thanks!
Joaquín
Not of the top of my head, I’m afraid. Take a look for some other themes that do the same and see if you can learn something from the way they do it.
Quick question…
When doing the show/hide implementation, do you only have to do a ‘true’ state? For example, if you only do a ‘true’ state and what happens if true, does it just automatically hide it if the box is unchecked?
Thanks!
Alex
One of the best WP tutorial I have read. Keep up the good work. Very well written and easy to follow.
Thanks 🙂
I’m having a problem with
I get this error
Warning: Cannot modify header information – headers already sent by (output started at /var/www/wordpress/wp-content/themes/theme/functions.php:7) in /var/www/wordpress/wp-content/themes/theme/library/theme-options.php on line 83
Line 7 in functions.php is the previous php code,
and line 83 is;
header(“Location: themes.php?page=theme-options.php&saved=true”);
line 84; die;
Hope you can help. regards, Benjamin
I forgot to tell you this happens when I try to save the options
Thanks, Benjamin
See the above comments for a fix. You’ll need to change the page depending where you’ve put the file:
header(“Location: themes.php?page=theme-options.php&saved=true”);
That wasn’t it I had to save the file in UTF-8 and that fixed it
Regards, Benjamin
Sorry I cant figure it out when i’m saving or reset it gives me an error You do not have sufficient permissions to access this page. I put that get-option.php codes in to my functions.php and was tried with everything but still i can’t fix the problem can you pls tell me why this is happening.
Justin – A couple things come to mind. You’d need to make sure your markup is clean enough to handle this, but you separate the classes you need to be variable widths/heights in different places into new stylesheets. Then based on the theme options selection you would load that stylesheet.
So, left column, large body is checked, then load style1.css (code would look just like Alex’s last example in this post). I’m not sure you’re having php/javascript issues as much as understanding the power of CSS and clean, semantically rich markup.
[…] as follows:Day 1: IntroductionDay 2: Creating the different optionsDay 3: Styling the options pageDay 4: Implementing the options into a themeAnd that’s pretty much it. Unlike last time there won’t be a free eBook to download at the […]
Still not displaying; I’m just replying to your email.
Hi!
Great post. I get a “You do not have sufficient permissions to access this page” message when I try to save the options. Any ideas as how to fix the problem?
thanks.
Hey Christian,
I might be jumping to conclusions here, but it looks like you’ve Googled theme options pages, stumbled upon this site and found it doesn’t work. I apologise if this isn’t the case, but it seems you implemented it for a client’s project, found it doesn’t work and so thought you’d leave a comment. I of course am then obliged to spend my time replying to your comment to make it all work and you’ll then send it to your client and get paid lots. That’s the impression I’ve got anyway.
I’ll give you the same advice as above – compare your code to Biblioteca’s and see what differences you can find.
Hi Cristian,
If you work out what is causing this issue can you paste your findings here? I have tried and cannot find the problem.
Hope you are more successful…
Thanks
Hi Cristian,
I worked out that you need to change these to suit your file path. I changed mine to the following:
header(“Location: themes.php?page=functions.php&reset=true”);
Note the change to functions.php…
Thanks for sharing that James. In retrospective I was a tad harsh on Christian, but it’s always nice to see a community helping each other out. It’s comments like this I like 🙂
Ouch! You hit the nail on the head. This is client work. But aren’t we all looking for advice and hints for the advancement of our own work? And I’m not demanding anything, just made an attempt to see if your knowledge base had a reference of this scenario. But I guess not. Can’t blame me for trying. Keep up the good work.
It was more the way you did it than anything else. I’ve happily helped countless readers before, but I just can’t stand the
kind of comment. Perhaps I was a bit harsh. Sorry about that. Luckily a lovely reader has replied to your comment with a solution.
Thanks for the solution to that problem, and thanks to the Author for this helpful tutorial…
Great stuff exactly at the right time 😉
Just one question: When I put the Analytics code in the optionspage field and then look in the sourcecode of the page everything seems to be fine.
So I copied this options area and wanted to use it for an AdSense code but this doesn´t work because double quotes are not correctly interpreted. This is part of the output for the Analytics code:
and this for the AdSense code:
Any idea why this can be and how to solve it?
You need to put it in every single template file that calls the theme options, at the top of the file.
Erm. Hard to diagnose without seeing what you have and haven’t done, although I do recall a couple of similar errors when I was writing the tutorial. What I’d suggest doing is grab yourself a copy of Biblioteca and compare the options page code in that to what you’ve got. The options page in Biblioteca is located in /library/functions/
No problem. Do let me see the results!
Thanks, this is a great tutorial!
Glad you enjoyed it!
Hi,
I have been following this and all ok until today.
A bit confused about what actually goes in the get-theme-options.php file?
At the top of this page, is there some code not showing, i.e.
——————————–
Today comes the exciting implementation of our options page that we created yesterday. The first thing to do is to create a new file called get-theme-options.php and save it with your theme files. In this file paste the following:
CODE HERE
——————————–
Thanks for sharing this process – much appreciated.
James
Sorry about that. That was meant to remind me to paste the code! You should see it now.
Hi Alex,
Thanks for your reply. I still cannot see the code after clearing my cache but will check later.
Thanks again for sharing.
Should be there once the cache has refreshed. It if isn’t I’ll post it in a comment.
Hi Alex,
If you could paste it in the comment that would be great. Not sure why, but still unable to see it. Refreshed cache, tried different browsers too…
Thanks again.
Not to worry. The code you want is below. I’ve cleared the site’s cache – is it there now?
<?php//allows the theme to get info from the theme options page
global $options;
foreach ($options as $value) {
if (get_option( $value['id'] ) === FALSE) { $$value['id'] = $value['std']; }
else { $$value['id'] = get_option( $value['id'] ); }
}
?>
Hi Alex,
Thanks – yes it can be seen within the post now as well.
Hi!
Great tutorial, thank you. But your get-theme-options.php code is missing from the top page. What is the code that goes into get-theme-options.php file to make this all work?
Thanks again.
Ditto comment above/below. Next time you visit, please respect the request not to use your site’s name as the name of your comment.