I've been thinking (shocker.) Whenever I do custom WordPress development, there are always things like "I want to show the top 2 posts, but in the future I may want to show the top 3." Or, there are designers wanting to put content in places that aren't widget areas.
A settings page that controls any custom development is ideal so that less configuration-type settings are hard-coded. For example, if you use Kevin Sylvestre's Google Analytics plugin, you don't ever have to modify code. He could have deployed the code and under the installation instructions wrote "open up the googleanalytics.php file, look for the UA placeholder, and then put yours in its place." Instead, he made it a setting, and then you just fill in that setting. No messing with code. And that's exactly how it should have been done.
Those settings pages are all pretty similar, so why can't it be done even easier than writing the code for it? That's where my idea comes in. I'm going to make a web application that will create a plugin that will build you a custom settings page. Then you can reference those settings anywhere you want as you normally would a default WordPress setting. Whether you're a designer or developer, you'll be able to quickly and easily create custom settings page. I'm still mapping out how it's all going to work, but I plan to start development this week.
If you have any suggestions, leave a comment below or let me know.
