WordPress and the Settings API
The Settings API is a WordPress interface for a centralized control over your forms. Built on the top of the Options API, the Settings API provides a local mechanism for validation and control management over your settings groups. It creates a settings group stored in the database that includes a number of settings in a form. On submit you could define a validation function that escapes everything for the settings group.
It doesn’t do any automagic work (as other APIs and frameworks do) but having a user input to be stored in the database could be centralized in an elegant and easy to control way. Building the form and registering the fields follows an additional abstraction layer.
Check out the quick 9-steps guide on DevWP listing several tutorials and complete references as well.
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