Admin Option Page lacks Infos about serialized Option Values

[hakre]

WordPress iteself and many other Plugins store option-values as a so called "serialized string".

WordPress Admin has got a Page that displays all Options:
/wordpress/wp-admin/options.php

With this Page, many of those can be viewed and edited. But: The options that are stored as serialized values can not be edited nor viewed.

That means, if an Administrator want to get a view on the values, she/he needs to take a database viewer at least. And then the serzialized values are a very long string, rendering this very unusefull.

Therefore, this enhancement adds functionality to the Options Page sothat serialized values can be viewed. This is very usefull for example to analyse your setup.

The current motivation and why I'd like to see this in fast, is because of the problems that resulted with the current no-control situation to see which plugins are really activated through options . For example as describben in #9164.

[hakre]

Patch that enables infos and viewing of serialized values

[hakre]

Patch that enables infos and viewing of serialized values

[hakre]

Screenshot 1

[hakre]

Screenshot 2

[hakre]

Screenshot 3

[hakre]

Added the Patch (use the .patch file instead .txt for highlighting) and 3 Screenshots giving an impression of the changed. Serialized Values get now a Button to be clicked to get to a second page that displays the serialized content.

The Size of serialzed entries is added as well to give some more info.

[FFEMTcJ]

Postponing enhancements to 2.8

[hakre]

You call it an enhancement, I call it a fix. Anyhow it is called, it right now helps in case of configuration problems / fixing wordpress installations and therefore I would really love to see it in 2.7.2. Otherwise there is need of an additional Fix in the Admin Plugin page.

[hakre]

There is need to add the "has-patch" keyword if a Ticket has a patch. Did not know that, therefore I added it now.

[hakre]

fix the warning thrown by an undefined variable setting.

[Denis-de-Bernardy]

simpler patch

[Denis-de-Bernardy]

simpler patch attached

[hakre]

I had something like that first as well but the problem is, that the page will load a lot of data and the serialized data is displayed "as is" which means quite unreadable especially with larger strings.

[Denis-de-Bernardy]

commit, wontfix?

[Denis-de-Bernardy]

refreshed against 11256

[Denis-de-Bernardy]

this can wait

[Denis-de-Bernardy]

needs a refresh

[hakre]

refresh against 11635

[hakre]

Refresh.

[Denis-de-Bernardy]

I still think the second screen is a bit overkill. ;-)

[dd32]

I still think the second screen is a bit overkill. ;-)

Bet you wont be saying that when you see all the transients displayed inline taking up 500KB...

[Denis-de-Bernardy]

Good point. :D

[hakre]

Replying to Denis-de-Bernardy:

I still think the second screen is a bit overkill. ;-)

Depends on the option. But I won't rate that overkill. If the option has much data, it will be listed there. Maybe considering limits for depth and item size (compare to xdebug var_dump optins) might be considerable in a future iteration of this enhancement.

[hakre]

I still have the modification in one install pretty much working. Any chance to see that in?

[azaozz]

The latest patch seems to show Cheatin' uh? a lot. This would make a nice plugin if it had the ability to edit these arrays (maybe with var_export() for multi-dimensional arrays, etc.) or at least delete them. Of course editing would need to check the array in a sandbox before saving similar to how plugins are checked on activation.

Perhaps we can display the size and add an action that runs on serialized options on that screen to allow plugins to handle them.

[hakre]

I need to take a look if it still applies clean, but having even this (read-only) display in core helps a lot. For example if you face bugs like #10954 on a live site. I do not understand the fuzz why to not have it in in this basic version. It actually does help me a lot.

[hakre]

Replying to azaozz:

The latest patch seems to show Cheatin' uh? a lot.

I could not reproduce that, in any case that the older patch shouldn't apply cleanly any more I just freshed it against current trunk.

[hakre]

refreshed patch against 12031 - fixed cheatin' uh on "-" in option name

[hakre]

Now I could reproduce on option names containing a minus. Updated the patch to reflect that.

[scribu]

IMO, this should be handled by a plugin (faster iterations, more flexibility, less core bloat).

[cnorris23]

9175.2 works as of 12144. I like the UI for this, but I agree with scribu, that it might be better as a plugin.

[Denis-de-Bernardy]

maybe this ought to go in health check?

[hakre]

Refreshed against current trunk.

[hakre]

For those interested, updated patch against current trunk, was broken.

[MZAWeb]

Updated 9175.2.diff for 19712

[apedog]

I was going to open a ticket asking for this feature. So I'm re-opening this ticket that was closed 8 years ago as maybelater. Maybe maybelater can become maybesoon :P

I find the options.php page to be very useful. A lot easier than working with phpMyAdmin in many cases.

Having the option to at least view the serialized data would be really useful. JSON-encoded data shows in options.php page, so why not serialized data?
Editing would be a +1
Ability to beautify array would be another +1
Ability to beautify JSON would be a cherry on top.

[johnbillion]

Re-closing due to continued lack of interest. Can be reopened if somebody wants to shepherd a patch.