Re-using many of the elements covered in this chapter, this recipe creates a simple yet effective configuration interface to allow users to make changes to the color that is used to highlight private text in posts, instead of this color being hardcoded in a plugin file.

That being said, this recipe does introduce two new concepts. The first is the initialization of the plugin options by reading data from a file instead of having all of that information stored in the PHP code. This technique is useful when dealing with an option that has a lot of content, such as a style sheet.

The next element of interest is within the data processing function, where the code checks to see which button was pressed between the one to reset the style sheet and the one to submit user changes to be stored in the site database. Based on the result, the processing code will either read back the initial style sheet from the file or use the user-posted data to update the configuration data.

Beyond these two new concepts, the other main change is to the code that was outputting header code referencing an external style sheet file. In this new version, a change was made to echo the content of the style sheet that is stored in the options table directly to the browser.