I want to introduce you to a new function in 2.7 that might help to reduce the number of admin pages in your WordPress installation. The function allows plugin authors to extend the existing admin pages instead of creating new ones.

Here’s a quick example:

add_action('admin_init', 'add_my_settings_field');
 
function add_my_settings_field(){
 
// The fields are:
//the id the form field will use
//name to display on the page 
//callback function
//the name of the page
//the section of the page to add the field to
add_settings_field('my_field_id' , 'My Field Caption' ,
			'my_field_callback' , 'writing' , 'default');
 
//register the setting to make sure it gets checked
register_setting('writing','my_field_id');
}
 
function my_field_callback(){
 
//echo out the text field, drop down, or other type of field.			
echo '<input name="my_field_id" id="my_field_id" type="text"
 value="'.attribute_escape(get_option('my_field_id')).'" class="regular-text code" />';
 
}

In WordPress 2.7 admin pages are made of pages, sections and fields. In the above example I have added a new field to the writing page (Settings > Writing) in the default section.

This not only creates the table rows and table header for the form field, it also saves the value for you. The above code is everything you need to add the new question.

The value can be accessed again using get_option(’my_field_id’).

You could just as easily add it to the remote_publishing section, by changing the last attribute in the add_settings_field function in the example to ‘remote_publishing’.

If you take a look at the options-writing.php page in wp-admin you will see that beneath each section there is a function, do_settings_fields, that lists the page and the section in its arguments; i.e. do_settings_fields(’writing’, ‘remote_publishing’)

These tell you the settings you need to add fields in that part of the page.

I think this is a very important step in helping to reduce the clutter in WordPress, no longer will a new admin page be needed for a single setting if it could sit in an existing page.

When was the last time you used the search box on your blog? Well, I found myself using mine extensively over the weekend to find my old tutorials and while doing that it occurred to me that I hadn’t used a search box on a blog, any blog, for as long as I could remember.

On the whole I tend to use Google for everything. There’s a few reasons for this. First is that it tends to find stuff pretty quickly and efficiently. Far more efficiently than visiting a site and then using their search box.

The second reason is that the good search box is up there on my browser so even if I am on their blog it is second nature to type into that instead of looking around for their search box.

Despite all this I’m not suggesting that blogs shouldn’t have search boxes, just that Google, Yahoo, and I assume Microsoft ( I couldn’t find their page about it ) offer simple ways to roll your own search engine. If these were made into optional plugins for WordPress, presumably bundled with it, then the search code could be removed from WordPress altogether.

If less is more then this is something to think about.