There is provided a method for advanced configuration and initialization of a luminaire system. The luminaire system comprises one or more lighting devices (102), an apparatus (104) and a user interface (106). The apparatus comprises a light sensor. One or more of the lighting devices are not connected to a central controller by means of a wired/wireless connection. Therefore, techniques and procedures to use manual interaction by an operator (114) to control these lighting devices are proposed. The proposed techniques enable backward compatible and low-cost implementations of advanced luminaire initialization and configuration. Moreover, this invention proposes to combine the user input, sensing and control functionality into one device, thereby reducing the total cost of implementation and ownership of the proposed system. A corresponding system and apparatus are also presented.