Creating themes to give away or sell is great, but not everyone who uses your theme will have a solid understanding of HTML/CSS. Providing your theme with an options page makes it easier for non-technical users to make theme changes without getting their hands dirty with code. So without further ado, here are 10 resources to help you create a wordpress options page.

Creating Custom Options Pages in WordPress

Not too long ago, the process of creating an Options page for a WordPress theme was a bit of a nightmare. Sure, it was relatively easy to do once you’d wrapped your head around the process, but, it required an extensive amount of work, including writing security checks, creating the forms, manually adding hidden inputs, and so on.

How to Create a Better WordPress Options Panel

Today, we’ll go through the entire process of creating an admin options panel for a WordPress theme, using the excellent WooFramework as an example. Then, we’ll take things a step further, as we implement jQuery to improve some of the functionality.

How to Integrate an Options Page into your WordPress Theme

This tutorial will focus mostly on the programmatic side, but in order to change something about the layout, we’ll need to have a few design ideas up our sleeves, as well.

How To Create An Options Page For Your WordPress Theme

WordPress is one of the most popular Content Management Systems. Also WordPress is a CMS of choice for many web developers It’s relatively easy to use, but can be made even simpler when you include an administration panel for users when making themes. Additionally, themes buyers find the options panel too easy to use rather than having to open up the PHP template files and fiddling with the code.

Create An Advanced Theme Options Panel in WordPress

Creating a WordPress theme options page is something that we’ve touched on before on WPShout, and this week we’ll be expanding on what we covered before to create not just a theme options page, but an advanced theme options page; we’ll be creating something that lets users change layouts, hide and display different elements dotted around the theme, enter ad codes, footer text, tracking codes, Feedburner URLs, anything really.

How To Create Tabs On WordPress Settings Pages

Using tabs in a user interface can help you better organize content, so it’s only natural that WordPress themes that have a lot of options would benefit from tabs on their settings page. In this tutorial, you will learn how to create a tabbed settings page, and you’ll get to download a WordPress theme that implements the code.

Create a WordPress Theme Options Page with the Settings API

Having an options page for your WordPress theme is a great way to increase the theme’s extensibility, usability and ease of operation. At first glance, implementing such a page may seem a hard task and not so long ago it was; however, now with the new WordPress Settings API introduced in version 2.7, creating an options page has become a task as simple as registering the required settings and then calling them where required.

Create Improved WordPress Theme Options Page

As WordPress keeps evolving and the guidelines for creating WordPress themes change with time, the method mentioned in the tutorial is not the best option for adding a theme options page to your WordPress theme.

Options Framework Plugin

The Options Framework Plugin makes it easy to include a full featured options panel in any WordPress theme.

WordPress Theme Options Panels; Examples & Best Practices

An options panel is pretty much essential these days for any premium theme; they are a great step forward in theme design for the casual user as it gives them the abilility to customise certain aspects of their sites without having to delve through html and css which is alien to them.