Customizer in WordPress

1. Customizer in WordPress
Beginning, Today and Future
Nilambar Sharma
Co-founder/CEO
WEN Themes
http://wenthemes.com
WordPress Nepal Meetup May 2016
Find me:
Twitter: @nilambar
Slack: rabmalin

3. What is Customizer?
● Framework for live-previewing any change to WordPress.
● Allows site admins to tweak a theme's settings, color scheme or widgets, and
see a preview of those changes in real time.
● All changes are on the fly. Changes are saved only when Save and Publish is
clicked.
● Remove hassle of to and fro while theme customization.
● Can be extended to add more customisation options.
● Integrates with the existing WordPress Settings API.

4. Beginning
● Added in WordPress 3.4 (June 2012)
● Objective: Easy Live Preview
● Initially, only limited features like; changing site title and tagline, Custom
Header, Custom Background and Static front page

5. Advancement
● WordPress 3.9
○ Widget Customization
● WordPress 4.0
○ Panels
○ Several built-in Controls
○ Contextual Controls
● WordPress 4.1
○ Expanded JavaScript APIs

6. Advancement continues
WordPress 4.3
Menu Customization
Cropped Image Control
Performance improvement
WordPress 4.4
Optimization
Better support for multi-dimensional settings

7. Today
WordPress 4.5
Device Preview
Selective Refresh
Setting-less Controls
Custom Logo
Shift-click improvements

8. What’s cooking now?
WordPress 4.6 (!)
Setting Validation
Notification Area
Better Error Reporting
JS Driven Widgets

9. Prospective
● Customizer Transactions
● Content authorship
● Undo / reset changes
● Lazy loading controls and settings
● Sidebar Resizer
● Dockable Sidebar
● Inline editing
● And many more…..

10. Future
● All in one package
● Preview fast, easy and intuitively
● Possibility: Whole admin panel replaced by Customizer :-)

11. Customizer is only for Themes?
● Nope.
● “Theme Customizer” is now “Customizer”.
● Several plugins have started using Customizer.
● While developing theme or plugin, don’t clutter the Customizer. Be generous
for others.
● Customizer is compulsory in dot org themes.

12. Any questions?

13. Thank You