Some good progress made today on Simple Lightbox’s options overhaul.

I’m much happier with the Content Types code brought over from Cornerstone now that I’ve slimmed it down to act as a good foundation for general field management (forms, options, etc.).

As with any functionality that deals with the user interaction, there multiple areas of work:

• Front-end: How the data is output for the user to interact with
• Back-end: Actions taken based on user input
• Interconnections: Making the front-end and back-end work together

Today, the main focus was getting the options class built up enough to output the options on the appropriate admin page.

Tomorrow’s primary mission will be to connect this (currently nonfunctional) front-end output to the back end.  This basically entails retrieving the option data from WordPress’ database and saving a user’s changes back to the database.

Is it somewhat anticlimactic that the end result of this work will be a settings page that looks exactly like it did before the overhaul?  Honestly, yes, but I’m more interested in the possibilities it opens up as the new system will be far more flexible.  Much more intuitive user interaction can be rapidly built once development is completed.