Earlier this year, Automattic added visual icons to the WordPress.com customizer after user testing showed users tried clicking on the parts of the page they wanted to edit, rather than searching through the menus in the customizer. In an effort to see if the same could be done for the self-hosted version of WordPress, Payton Swick…
Astute testers may have noticed a new feature in WordPress 4.7 beta 1 that enabled users to search, preview, and install themes from within the customizer. This feature was part of five feature projects related to the customizer that were approved for merge last month. Its goal is to unify the theme browsing and customizing…
WordPress 4.7 is a little more than a month away and is going to be packed with new features and improvements. In particular, five feature projects related to the customizer were approved for merge and will be part of the release. One of the feature projects is the custom CSS editor that enables users to…
Customize Changesets, the technical term for the infrastructure in the Customize Snapshots feature plugin, was merged into WordPress 4.7 yesterday. The project, formerly known as Customizer Transactions, brings the underlying architecture required for the ability to save a session as a draft. It enables WordPress to save a set of changes made in the Customizer…
The general advice given to users who want to make simple edits to a theme without losing them is to create a child theme. This involves creating a directory, CSS file, a functions.php file, and uploading them to the webserver via WordPress or FTP. Users must also make sure the child theme references the parent theme correctly in…
This week WordPress.com introduced a new Customizer panel to its users called Content Options. The new panel offers a number of minor tweaks that would ordinarily be handled by a few simple free plugins on a self-hosted site. It brings a whole new range of customizability to the WordPress.com sites that was not previously available.…
During the State of The Word at WordCamp US 2015, Matt Mullenweg highlighted customization as the largest opportunity to improve the WordPress experience. In a recent interview on WordPress Weekly, Mullenweg expanded on his thoughts saying he could see the customizer being the main focus of a release. “If I think about leading a release, I could…
Earlier this year we tested the Customize Snapshots feature plugin, which allows users to draft and preview customizer states. For the past several months Weston Ruter and his team at XWP have been working on adding the ability to schedule Customizer changes. This would allow users to stage content as a set of customizer changes,…
In a recent interview on the WordPress Weekly podcast, when asked about his comments at WordCamp US regarding customization being the biggest opportunity to improve the WordPress experience, Matt Mullenweg said, “The Customizer is everything.” He followed it up by saying that customizing sites via both the Customizer and themes is currently the platform’s weakest…
Yesterday, Nick Halsey, one of the maintainers of the WordPress Customize component, published a proposal to add content authorship to menus in the customizer. This feature is specifically targeted at new users who might wish to set up a menu that includes pages which have not yet been created. The scenario is familiar to those…
Like many developers just getting started with the WordPress Customizer API, Ahmad Awais began with frameworks like Kirki, Redux, and Titan. After a short time, Awais discovered the problem with using frameworks in his projects. “It quickly became hard to deal with the updates, backward compatibility, and then code quality especially concerning security,” he said.…
Last week Weston Ruter and the folks at XWP released Customize Posts version 0.5, which includes a new framework for postmeta and the ability to preview featured images. The feature plugin aims to introduce basic content authorship in the Customizer to improve the new user site setup experience and make it easier to edit existing…
We didn’t have a guest this week so Marcus Couch and I discuss the latest news and events happening in the WordPress community. We update listeners as to the status of the W3 Total Cache plugin. This segues into a conversation on whether caching plugins are necessary considering the improvements in technology in the last…
As the WordPress customizer becomes more widely adopted by theme and plugin developers, users often have a host of live preview options to play with when personalizing their sites. Different combinations can produce wildly different designs. What if you could save a preview of customizations before going live with it? This is the idea behind…
WordPress 4.5 is right around the corner with the first release candidate now available for download. It includes 49 changes from the last beta – improvements to the new custom logo feature, a minor update to jQuery, updates to inline documentation, and fixes for various small bugs. The upcoming release is packed full of improvements…