Got options?

No, this isn’t another post promoting my Options theme. It’s about theme options pages.

Anybody that’s used one of my themes knows about the all-important theme options page, or, as I like to call it, the theme settings page.

Theme options pages have been around for quite some time, but only recently have more and more theme developers started taking advantage of this. This also pulls the competition a little bit closer as users have more choices.

For the last few days, one of the numerous things I’ve been working on is creating a new theme options page from the ground up. So, I started with one of my themes that’ll soon be updated: Visionary. It was my first magazine theme that really hit the spotlight in the WP community, and it’s about time for a major overhaul.

A new theme Options page for WordPress

(Click on the image for a large view.)

What do you think?

Basically, I’m just trying to do an entire rethinking of how I set up my theme settings pages. And yes, each of those boxes is collapsible. All it took was a few lines of jQuery and some WordPress admin CSS classes.

I completely built this thing up from a blank Notepad file to what it is. Well, I had a little help from the WordPress Codex on adding administration menus.

I’m sure I’ll write a tutorial for you other theme authors looking to add a few options to your themes in the near future.

The new administration menus will be coming in my new themes and the next major releases of my old themes.

What I really want to know, especially after you’ve looked at the screenshot, is what options should be available?