Custom admin pages in WordPress are one of those things that aren’t often needed if you’re using something like the Settings API, the add_menu_page function, or a similar API function.
And in many, if not most, cases all of the above suffice; however, there are times where you need more control over what’s displayed to the user, how the input is handled once it’s submitted, and then what’s returned to the user after the data has been saved to the database.
In those cases, it’s helpful to know how to write custom admin pages in WordPress and all that comes with it – from sanitization, custom error messages, validation, and page redirection.
Custom Admin Pages in WordPress
In my latest series on Envato’s Tuts+ network, I cover this topic in a four-part series. As it’s described:
The series landing page on Envato.
As it’s described:
It’s possible to write our own custom WordPress administration pages. In this series, we’re going to take a look at how to do exactly that.
It’s simple, sure, but here is a brief rundown of the topics discussed in each of the four parts:
- This part aims to answer the question: What about the times when we’re working with a custom solution for clients and we need a little more flexibility than the Settings API provides?
- The second part of the series focuses exclusively on creating the administration page. It doesn’t deal much with doing anything beyond that; however, it aims to cover how to use can use an object-oriented approach to building a custom admin page in WordPress.
- In this section, things begin to get a little more advanced as I begin to talk about security, permissions, and sanitizing information that’s written to the database.
- Finally, I wrap up by walking through how to retrieve information from the database and validate it for security. I also talk about how to not only display it in the admin area of WordPress but on the front-end, as well.
The point of the series is not to discuss how to side-step the APIs that WordPress provides out-of-the-box. In fact, much of the work that I do in the series leverages many of the existing APIs.
But if you’re in the business of working on custom solutions for yourself, for your company, or for someone else, and you need to implement your own systems for validation, sanitization, messaging, and so on, then it can be helpful to have resources available that walk through exactly that.
Each article of the series includes comment code samples and a downloadable version of the plugin at the state in which it currently resides with a completed version of the work available at the end of the series.
So if writing custom admin pages in WordPress – or anything that’s even remotely related – is of relevance to your work, be sure to check it out. And, as always, don’t hesitate to leave a comment, contact me, or shoot me a note on Twitter.
