In reply to Luke Cavanagh.

Yep, I'm all for live editing in the customizer and seeing the changes immediately. Those that complain about the containment should also realize there is a plugin (or its easy to write one yourself), that allows for click + drag resizing, full screen editing and even hiding it from view entirely if you like.

I'm also all for the idea of a live css editor. I've written a nice plugin myself that I've updated and used over the years but I don't leave it around for my clients.

It's a development tool and therefore...

I'm definitely NOT in favor of a custom css editor in the core. I believe this is plugin territory.

In fact, it kind of undermines all of the work I've put into my own plugin but then again, this core version is nothing close to usable (for me) in the fact that it stores and loads the css from the database with inline style tags and doesn't support per post/page css. In my opinion, the css stored in the db should only be used for revisions and during live editing/preview. The front end should load css from the file system or better yet, compressed and cached. It should also be disposable in that you can disable and even uninstall the plugin while leaving the work you completed left behind.

What I would have preferred to see added to the cuztomizer is a new customizer control type for posts so we can stop using hacks. This would give theme/plugin authors superior firepower and freedom to use the customizer for live front end editing within the customizer in a way that everyone can finally adopt and start using it.

There are some really great themes that let you control everything in the customizer, post/page content is missing the boat big time.

I'm also all for the idea of all admin options being accessible in the customizer. It's clearly more efficient to see results immediately and with the preview capability, it just might save your @$$ some day.