I'm continuing my work on a Wordpress site that uses forum posts as content (more on this can be found here and here).
After creating news section which takes first post of every topic and turns it into a Wordpress post I need something more complicated - a section of articles. This requires taking the first post of a topic and appending the remaining posts to the first one - just like chapters in the article. And actually this is something that I've already achieved. I'm using a second query to get posts from a topic, and by using variables for topic IDs and post IDs I can even specify which posts will be imported and appended. The problem is I need to be able to add, edit or remove topics and posts IDs from the query. After using settings API in the news section I thought that it wouldn't be too difficult to use it here, but sadly it is. And this is where I need help.
What I need is an options page that will list all the topics and posts IDs, and let me add, edit or delete these settings and will update the list. I tried to use the settings API, to add a pair of forms every time an option is added, but I'm not even close to what I need. I'm not even sure if storing a multidimentional array ( article# => array( topic_id => 'value', posts_ids => 'values' ) ) as an option is a good idea. I'll be grateful for any ideas.