New WordPress Feature Proposal Adds Content Authorship to Menus in the Customizer

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 who have set up a good number of WordPress sites: You visit the pages menu in the admin to create a bunch of empty pages that you want to be displayed in the menu, and then you add them all to a new menu. This fills out the design and then you can go back and create the content later.

With users given the option to customize after activating a theme, they’re more likely to try creating a menu before any of the pages have been published. This feature proposal makes it possible to create new pages in the customizer while adding them to a menu, as shown in the demo Halsey published:

Halsey emphasized that the feature will not replace the ability to create pages in the admin via the post editor. Content authorship in menus is squarely aimed at new users and those who are restructuring a site.

“To allow new content to be created in the customizer, posts are created with the auto_draft status,” Halsey explained. “When the user saves and publishes in the customizer, these newly-created posts are transitioned to be published. In the customizer preview, the status is modified to protected to allow the posts to be previewed.”

Term creation is not yet part of the UI but Halsey said this is a consideration for the future. The new feature will also include a filter for disabling content authorship on a per-post-type basis.

Halsey also clarified the relationship between content authorship for menus and the Customize Posts project:

Part of the inspiration for this feature comes from the Customize Posts plugin, which has the ability to live-preview posts and post meta in the customizer. Only a very small portion of the plugin would make its way into core as part of the nav menus content authorship feature. However, the proposal is currently to establish the wp.customize.Posts namespace for future expansions of post-related functionality in the customizer. The existing plugin would extend this core namespace, and other plugins could do so as well.

At this time the team has no plans to push Customize Posts forward for merge into core, but Halsey said an upcoming feature project will “explore the future of live preview in WordPress at a broader level.”

For the most part, feedback on the proposal has been positive and enthusiastic. The bulk of the work for adding content authorship to menus has already been completed and the latest patch on the project’s ticket is ready for testing. The Customizer team is targeting WordPress 4.7 to propose the feature for inclusion in core.