I’m building out a proof-of-concept SaaS using WP to power the backend. I’m using a mix of WP core functionality, two or three main plugins, and a lot of custom code.

One thing that we need to simplify for users is managing settings. There are lots of things in core WP settings that we don’t want them to be bothered with. Same thing goes for settings on some of the plugins.

I’ve disabled some of the main options pages that aren’t needed (Reading, Writing, etc) but in some cases there are settings we don’t need (Tagline, Week Starts on, etc) interspersed with ones we do (Site Title, Timezone).

To help simplify this, I considered just building out our own custom settings pages using Piklist and hiding all the default settings pages – which brings me to my questions:

1) Can a Piklist settings field be configured to automatically update a core WP setting (using the specific option name that we want to overwrite) or would we just have to use piklist_pre_update_option to write out to the appropriate core setting upon saving the Piklist field?

2) Is there a way to set the value of a field (to something other than what it’s value is in the database) when it’s loaded in admin? Just in case something else besides Piklist had changed the core settings that we’re controlling, I’d want to read those core/plugin values back into the form field when loading up the Piklist settings page (so the options page displays current data). I’m looking for something similar to what ACF has with load_value https://www.advancedcustomfields.com/resources/acf-load_value/

Any examples or thoughts are much appreciated!