[wp-hackers] Best practices for upgrading plugin options?

[Philip Walton]

Steve, as long as you're only adding additional items to your option in 
future releases, using wp_parse_args() against the defaults should 
always work. If a user has old settings stored in the database (meaning 
they are missing the new items in the options array), they will be 
seamlessly merged with the new defaults and updated the next time the 
user saves.

This gets a little tricky when you're not just adding a new item but you 
want to change the way an old item is used. In such cases I'd recommend 
creating a new item entirely and deprecating the old one. That will give 
you the ability to check if a deprecated item is still stored in the 
options table and allow you to deal with it or (if absolutely necessary) 
inform the user in an admin alert that they need to update their options 
because of new functionality.

Philip




On 4/28/11 11:44 AM, Steve Bruner [SlipFire] wrote:
> Hi Sean,
>
> Thanks for the suggestion. The issue is that we are going to release future
> versions with different settings and defaults, and we don't know which
> version the user is upgrading from, so we would have to keep each default
> settings array in all future versions.  I was hoping for a cleaner solution.
>
> Steve
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