Features

A plugin inspired by Drupal’s modules (Features and Strongarm) that enable the versioning of options in WordPress.

The general idea is to export a maximum amount of settings and structural content of the database to files to be able to deploy them through VCS (like SVN, GIT, Mercurial).

For now, the only exportable settings are the entries of the “wp-options” table.

Do you need this?

If you’re the only developer working on you’re website, you’re having only one development environment (production server) and you do not use VCS: no, the only things you need is to close your eyes, cross your fingers and hope that everything go fine.

How to use it?

In the admin, a new page called Features is accessible under the Tools menu. This page list all the settings contain in your features_options_data.php file. If one of the setting in your database has not the same value of the one in the file, the Revert button will be accessible to click and a text field will show you the value from the database.

• If you want to replace what is in the database with the value from the file, click the Revert button.
• If you want to replace what is in the file with the value from the database (for versioning), copy the content of the text field to the file.

Add a new option to the filter

To add a new option from the wp_options table, use the features_options filter to alter the options array: column value as the key and the option_value column value as the value.

What’s next?

This plugin is under development. If you know what your doing, you can use it and there will be an upgrade path, at least, a manuel one.

Like Features, the goal would be to have plugins generation for features instead of manually edit the features_options_data.php file of the plugin.