Managing multiple sets of user settings from a single admin page

Throughout this chapter, you have learned how to create configuration pages to manage single sets of configuration options for our plugins. In some cases, only being able to specify a single set of options will not be enough. For example, looking back at the Twitter embed shortcode plugin that was created in the previous chapter, a single configuration panel would only allow users to specify one set of options, such as the desired Twitter feed dimensions or the number of tweets to display.

A more flexible solution would be to allow users to specify multiple sets of configuration options, which could then be called up by using an extra shortcode parameter (for example, [twitterfeed user_name="WordPress" option_id="2"]).

While the first thought that might cross your mind to configure such a plugin is to create a multi-level menu item with submenus to store a number of different settings, this method would produce a very awkward...