Note that my submit button in plugin_options_page() has no “name” on it. This is because I don’t care about it. Buttons without names submit no extra parameters, they just submit. But, give it a name, and it returns the value on it.

There’s two ways to do this.
1. Unique values
2. Unique names

The first way would look like this:
input type=”submit” name=”plugin_options[submit]” value=”Submit”
input type=”submit” name=”plugin_options[submit]” value=”Reset”

In this case, my validation function would get back an $input['submit'] which would be set to either “Submit” or “Reset”, depending on which button I clicked. You could take action appropriately. Note that you would probably not want to set $newinput['submit'] to return from this function, unless you wanted to store that value in the database for some strange reason…

Problem with this is that the “value” is what is actually displayed on the page. If you translate that into another language, your code now has to look for that value. It’s problematic.

Second way:
input type=”submit” name=”plugin_options[submit]” value=”Submit”
input type=”submit” name=”plugin_options[reset]” value=”Reset”

In this case, I will get either $input['submit'] or $input['reset'] back. Because only one will come back depending on what button is pressed, I can ignore the value and take action based on which one is set. Similarly, I’d want to not put this resulting value in $newinput, same as before.

Funnily, I just installed SFC today, and realized only afterwards the author links led me back to this blog.

Check your register_setting call. That call basically turns on the setting, so that it can get whitelisted.

Also check your validation function. That function has to return the modified input, if you don’t return anything, then the variables get lost and nothing gets saved.

Take a look at my SFC plugin. The base sfc.php file implements this, and you might see what you’re missing. Note that it doesn’t use any “update_option” calls anywhere.

Would you know of a way to detect which submit button is clicked when multiple ones are provided (e.g. to provide a reset option)? It seems like the form gets redirected following the submit, so I cannot capture the name of the reset button and hook options reset functionality into this.

However, I left that stuff out specifically to make the code easy to understand. I was mainly focused on how the code works, not how to do admin like styling and such.

One thing about this great tutorial that could be greater is the submit buttons. The code you posted makes some weird plain looking ones, if instead of :

<input name="Submit" type="submit" value="" />

You use:
<input type="submit" name="submit" value="" />

Then they look like other pretty buttons in the admin.

Either way thanks for documenting this. Some day maybe I’ll convert all your info into a Codex doc (or just add phpdoc to the actual functions :S )