WordPress 4.9 includes a new experience for discovering, installing, and previewing themes in the customizer. It is now possible to set up every aspect of a site except for content within the customization workflow with live preview.
I’ve been working on integrating themes with the customizer for several years. Back in 2014, when I was deep into the process of bringing menu management into the customizer, I posted some initial thoughts on the UX and technical prerequisites for an improved themes experience:
We ended up shipping a minimal interface for switching themes in WordPress 4.2, in early 2015. This grew out of a small weekend project and was severely limited by its restriction to themes that were already installed on the site. While this project was an important step in the development of the customizer, looking back, it should not have been shipped with WordPress core.
In the summer of 2016, as I prepared to take on a larger contributing role for the development of WordPress 4.7, I decided to tackle the more-impactful challenge of theme installation. Many of the technical barriers noted in my original idea post had been resolved. I had also evolved the conceptual interface to a more unified experience. Given the limited volume of contributors and the number of active projects at the time, I spent several weeks designing, developing, and marketing the feature with little help. Despite extensive efforts to follow the “best practice” core development processes, the project lacked community interest and momentum. The feature was merged into WordPress 4.7, only to be painfully removed during beta due to anonymous feedback provided to the release lead. The exact reasons for delaying the feature remain unclear.
I continued pursuing a path forward for a new customize-integrated themes experience. Instantly previewing a new theme on your site and with your content is a powerful concept. I persistently requested additional feedback and rephrased the project goals in an attempt to get enough buy-in to continue improving on the feature. Finally, there was a breakthrough when it became clear that the new user experience could be shipped with a few minor changes to the visual interface.
The broken process of actually finding a WordPress.org theme was stripped down to the bare minimum in the new interface. A future project will focus on improving the way that users browse and find themes in more detail. In WordPress 4.9, users get the best theme-browsing experience currently available, in a drastically improved workflow integrated directly with the process of customizing a site.
For more information, check out my feature post on Make WordPress Core: