WPWeekly Episode 255 – All About the Customizer

In this episode of WordPress Weekly, Marcus Couch and I are joined by Weston Ruter and Nick Halsey, lead developers of the Customize component in WordPress.

I invited Ruter and Halsey on the show to give us some insight into its origin and why it was created. We also discuss its evolution since WordPress 3.6 and why it’s an important part of WordPress’ future.

The duo shared their experience of what it’s like to iterate on a feature that routinely receives push-back from a subset of the community. We also talk about the perception that features are continuously being crammed into the Customizer when it’s really about adding live previews to WordPress functionality.

Last but not least, Ruter and Halsey describe what improvements we can expect to see going forward. For details on how to contribute to the Customize component, please visit the Make Core Customize Component website.

Plugins Picked By Marcus:

Product Designer allows you to display an awesome Product Designer on your website via short-code. You can add unlimited clip art using a custom post. Text can be used with a fancy font family, font size and color.

Text To Speech Widget converts any text into speech in a selected language and voice. It supports 63 voices in different languages. The plugin is based on HTML5 and doesn’t require using Flash.

Featured Products First for WooCommerce allows a product in WooCommerce to be featured on the first shop page as well as search results. It also comes with a sidebar widget to display featured products on the homepage.

WPWeekly Meta:

Next Episode: Wednesday, December 14th 3:00 P.M. Eastern

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Listen To Episode #255:
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4 responses to “WPWeekly Episode 255 – All About the Customizer”

  1. push-back from a subset of the community

    so now the number of people that have an opinion matters :( it took very few (one ?) people to cancel the theme install feature which was already in the beta, does this also fall under the push-back of the “subset”, or was that specific subset more important than other subsets?

      • Jeff, I think the range of people objecting to the big customizer plan, or just specific parts of it is also very broad. It probably represent the voice of a large community of developers that are forced into working with the customizer.

        Obviously since the customizer was forced on theme developers they have stopped wasting time complaining, but that does not mean that it is a subset of the developers community that is complaining, as far as anyone knows it might also be the majority that complains.

        Anyway characterizing it as a “push-back” is exaggeration, people venting in the tavern is not a “push-back” as everyone knows that decisions are not made here.

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