WordPress is built to import and export content. As such, there is no built-in way to import or export settings.
Some theme and plugin authors, however, have built tools into their systems that import/export XML files that their systems can use store options.
A great example is WordPress SEO by Yoast. Not only can you import/export settings from his plugin, but you can import settings from other systems, too. Yoast’s plugin exports an .ini
file that contains options and settings in the following format:
; This is a settings export file for the WordPress SEO plugin by Yoast.com - http://yoast.com/wordpress/seo/
[wpseo]
version = "1.0.3"
[wpseo_indexation]
0 =
[wpseo_permalinks]
[wpseo_titles]
[wpseo_rss]
[wpseo_internallinks]
[wpseo_xml]
This is just one example. My personal recommendation is that you add a button or other trigger that saves your 500 or so custom options in an XML file. You’ll have to write this yourself, but it should be fairly straight-forward.
You can then import this same XML file, parse it, and restore your options. Once again, something you’ll have to write, but do-able.
If you want to use XML, I recommend you read up on the DOMDocument object that ships with PHP5. It makes creating/reading/manipulating XML documents via PHP pretty easy.