Where should I store global data for my multi-site WordPress plugin?

Question

I wrote a plugin for WordPress which has a few user-configurable settings that are stored using WordPress's suggested method. I know they are saved in the wp_options table, but that is abstracted by the WordPress options API.

Now I'm trying to add a "global override" of the settings that can be configured in the Network Admin section of a multi-site installation. I found the appropriate hooks to design my settings page, however I can't find any info about where to save the data.

If I save it using the normal options API, then the settings get saved individually for each site. I'm looking for a place to save them globally for all sites, so the plugin can first look to see if the settings have been globally overridden by the server admin.

I can just write some code to write directly to the wp_options table of one of the sites (for example site #1) or even create my own table. I know how to do all of these things, but I don't want to do that if there's a preferred way to write mult-site plugins.

Thanks for any advice.

Answer 1

As you know the main deference between developing a single WordPress plugin vs. a multisite plugin is where data is written. According to this article since plugins normally have complete reign over one database, and in some cases the plugins local pages files you must be sure to only call the $wpdb global object instead of a hard-coded reference to a table.

For example, if you need to execute an SQL command on the posts table, then do not use wp_posts as the table name $post_count = $wpdb->get_var($wpdb->prepare("SELECT COUNT(*) FROM wp_posts"));

use this

$post_count = $wpdb->get_var($wpdb->prepare("SELECT COUNT(*) FROM $wpdb->posts"));

Please see the article for further info.