Quick access to WordPress options

One of the first things that you probably check right after upgrade to a new WordPress version is the Options menu in the administration interface. Is there something new? Are there more ways that WordPress can be tweaked and tuned now? Can I … Anyway, I don’t have to tell you about it. You know.

But what you probably don’t know is that there is a quick way to see all WordPress options on one screen. Even those that aren’t accessible through the Options menu interface. And not only that, but you can even edit all those options at once.

To access the page with all options, go to your administration interface, and append options.php to the URL, so that it looks something like http://domain/blog/wp-admin/options.php .

We will come back one day to this topic to see how this can be useful (hint: plugin development). Until then remember that it is pretty easy to break and destroy your WordPress installation buy editing these options directly. You should stick to the regular interface of the Options administration. Be warned.

Update: Obviously, I left out the most interesting part – how to do a cleanup of old options, left by plugin installations. All these options are stored in wp_options table in your WordPress database.  You can use your favorite MySQL administration tool (be that mysql command or PHPMyAdmin or something else) to remove the rows which you are totally sure you don’t need.  You can either use “DELETE FROM wp_options WHERE option_name = ‘some_option’” SQL statement, or a bit safer version – “SELECT option_id,option_name FROM wp_options WHERE option_name = ‘some_option’” to find out the ID of the option, and then “DELETE FROM wp_options WHERE option_id = XX” (substitute XX with option ID that you find in the previous query).  Note that these SQL queries assume that the prefix of your WordPress tables is “wp_”.  You should change table names in the queries accordingly, if you use a different prefix.