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My First WordPress Plugin: Options Pixie
There's been a number of times when I've wanted to quickly check the value of a record in the wp_options table of a WordPress site's database, but not had easy access to the database, usually when the site and database are on a remote server. I've tried using the /wp-admin/options.php page, but it's not ideal and does not show the contents of serialized values, which of course is where so many interesting values lie in wait.
There are of course a few existing WordPress plugins for working with the wp_options database table, but none have quite fit my needs, either by not showing values in a usable way, not having good search and sort, or simply throwing a million errors when in debug mode (which you always seem to want on when the need arises for checking your options records).
Although I've been developing WordPress plugins for Delicious Brains since mid 2014, I've never actually released a plugin of my own. That doesn't seem right, especially as most of my team mates have excellent plugins of their own.
So I've scratched my itch as they say, and have developed and released my first open source WordPress plugin called Options Pixie.
![Options Pixie List View [IMG]](/media/2018/08/options-pixie-list-view.png){kind=link}
![Options Pixie Rich View [IMG]](/media/2018/08/options-pixie-rich-view.png){kind=link}
Actually, as I write this, Options Pixie has been released and available from the WordPress plugins repository, GitHub and my own business site for over 7 months, as I released it at the beginning of July 2015. I guess the fact that I haven't spoken about it here, only once on twitter, is a testament to my awesome marketing skills. Maybe not.
I'm not sure why I haven't been jumping up and down and shouting about Options Pixie, as I'm really quite proud of it. It works very well for what I need it to do, and I went to great pains to make it a very high quality and robust WordPress plugin. Maybe I can just blame my natural and very British reserve?
Regardless, I've finally finished off this post (I started it just a few days after releasing Options Pixie, 7 months ago), and encourage anyone that finds themselves in the position of needing to check the contents of their WordPress site's options table to search the WordPress plugins repository and install Options Pixie. It's currently at version 1.0.1 having had a few bug fixes, and there's a new version in the wings which improves some of the behind the scenes functionality, enhances working with base64 encoded values, and is tested with the latest versions of WordPress.
Options Pixie on wordpress.org
Here's the highlights of what Options Pixie offers:
List, filter, sort and view options records, even serialized and base64 encoded values.
- List, sort and search options
- “Rich view” of serialized and JSON string values
- Works with base64 encoded serialized and JSON string values
- Highlights broken serialized values
- Supports multisites
With Options Pixie you can find out what is really going on with your WordPress options. I'm also working on Options Pixie Pro, a paid addon that adds bulk actions such as delete and fix serialized, add, edit and delete functionality, and of course priority email support.
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"My First WordPress Plugin: Options Pixie" was published on February 6, 2016.