Hardening repeater fields and nested meta storage in WordPress

I’ve been maintaining a WordPress plugin boilerplate focused on long-term structure rather than quick scaffolding.

Just shipped v1.3.0, and this version is less about features and more about fixing subtle data stability issues in field handling.

The main areas I tightened up:

• Scalar fields being deleted when empty
• Checkbox false state inconsistencies
• Select/Radio storing numeric indexes instead of semantic values
• Repeater edge cases:
  • malformed nested input names
  • template rows being saved
  • empty rows persisting
  • non-deterministic indexing

The core change was aligning the lifecycle:

render → sanitize → persist

The goal is predictable storage shape over time, especially with nested repeaters.

If you’ve built structured admin UIs in WordPress, you’ve probably run into some of these edge cases.

Curious how others approach repeater sanitation and option normalization in long-lived plugins.