One of the best ways to theme wrangle, test plugins, and to go about just about any WordPress coding fun, is use a WordPress install dedicated for development and testing.
If you haven’t, I seriously encourage you to do so. (Tom wrote a tutorial a while back that can get you all setup.)
If you’ve tested enough themes and plugins, you will want to reset your test environment to clear out the options table along with everything else. Instead of re-installing WordPress, give this plugin a try:
WordPress Database Reset
Key in the code and click the button.
WordPress Database Reset is a secure and easy way to reinitialize your WordPress database back to its default settings without actually having to reinstall WordPress yourself.
Theme and plugin developers tend to forget to clean up after themselves and lots of junk gets piled into the WordPress database (most likely the wp_options table).
This plugin allows you to securely reset the database, deleting everything except the admin user.
Head over to the WordPress Plugin Directory to grab the download and get more info.
Andy Darnell says
Very nice. Bookmarked.
Eric Dye says
😀
Mark says
This scares me a little bit as it seems to easy to nuke the databse by accident.
“Use with Caution” should be added to the description.
Eric Dye says
I believe that’s why they give you the “decoder” text to manually key in.
Funny you should say that. It felt a little scary when I reset my local dev setup — LOL!
Chris Berthe says
Hello, thanks for the post 🙂
I just released another version yesterday evening that allows you to select which tables you would like to reset – rather than having to reset the entire database.
@Mark didn’t mean to scare you ! I hope with the amount of information I give to the user they’ll know what the plugin is actually for 🙂 It’s funny though, I too was nervous when I reset it for the time (obviously on a development site).
Thanks again.
Eric Dye says
Woot! Awesome! Great new feature!