In early February we reported that the Widget Customizer plugin had received the green light to be merged into the WordPress core for 3.9. At that time Andrew Nacin opened a ticket to help precipitate any necessary improvements and guide the details of how the files should be merged.
After three weeks of polishing, the Widget Customizer feature was officially merged into core today. Props go out to Weston Ruter and his team of dedicated developers who helped make this feature a reality.
For those adventurous souls who have been testing the feature using the Widget Customizer plugin, you can now remove it and start testing it within the trunk.
No Changes Required From Theme Developers
Theme developers will not need to add theme support for the customizer to indicate a widget’s support for live previews, as this was stripped from the version of the plugin that was merged. Instead, the team opted to generalize this functionality so that any feature utilizing the customizer controls can do partial preview updates. Widgets still get live previews, but the window will refresh in an unobtrustve way as you make changes. Now that the widget customizer will soon be a native part of the WordPress publishing experience, WordPress users should be sure to read up on all the capabilities it will add.
Thanks! Note that the version of Widget Customizer merged into Core does not include the functionality which required you to
add_theme_support( 'widget-customizer' )to opt-in for live previews. The pseudo-live previewing of widgets in the preview was removed with the goal of abstracting the functionality so that any customizer control (not just widgets) can do partial preview updates (e.g. changing menus). So for now, when you make a change to a widget, it will end up doing a full refresh of the preview window as you enter the changes, but the customizer preview refreshing logic does try to make this unobtrusive.