During the redesign/development of a site and migration to WordPress, we ended up creating a custom plugin, after custom plugin to handle various post types and other custom functionality. After a period of a few months it became evident that we had too many plugins, updating code was beginning to become a logistical nightmare, not to mention some things didn’t really constitute a full plugin. While tweaking some JetPack settings one day, I thought to myself how can I emulate the JetPack feature manage page, with our own plugins. I remembered a session from a previous WordCamp about the Custom Fields API and set out to create my own merged plugin.
In this session I’ll describe some of the custom code challenges we had, and how I used the Settings and Options APIs to create a control panel to enable and disable specific plugin features. The control panel allows the site to turn on or off specific sections of the plugin. I also added in a default features section for features that should always be on.
I’ll walk through the code, show the basics of how to create a version of your own, and answer any questions.