Tag: Customizer

WordPress Core Contribution Retrospective

I contributed to WordPress core from 2013 through 2021. WordPress core is the open-source software that powers 40% of the web. My contributions ranged from software code and designs to project management, documentation, and outreach. Most of this work happened as a volunteer. This post summarizes my involvement in the project. It’s long but hopefully successful in distilling eight years…

WordPress Plugin Status Updates

I have developed over 25 free plugins on WordPress.org. My plugins offer functionality for multimedia content, site customization, widgets, social media, and site utilities. I published most of these plugins between 2013 and 2016 and have made fewer updates in recent years. I still use many of them on my personal sites, some are simple enough that updates are not…

Customizer Themes in 4.9

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…

Building and Managing Dynamic Multi-part Pages with WordPress

Twenty Seventeen is the first bundled theme to provide a way to create multi-part pages with WordPress, via a front page sections option that features multiple pages on the front page. This is useful for largely single-page sites, but limits the functionality of a front page as a showcase for and gateway to content throughout larger sites. For sites with…

Trust WordPress with Live Preview

When most of us walk into a building, we assume that it’s safe. We trust that it’s built to code and structurally sound. And we trust that the engineers and architects behind the building know what they’re doing. If a room is too hot or cold, bright or dim, spacious and sprawling or tight and cramped, many people are uncomfortable…

A Strategy for Custom Colors in the Customizer

The customizer is a framework for live-previewing any change to a WordPress site. It is particularly useful for previewing visual change and has always included a color control and the ability to easily preview custom colors. But the previewing experience has often been a bit slow. This post outlines a strategy for custom colors that leverages instant JS-based previewing in…

The Customizer is the Future for Themes and Theme Options

There has been a lot of backlash from the WordPress community recently over the theme review team’s decision to require theme options to be implemented in the Customizer. But this decision really is in everyone’s best interest. WordPress 4.2 shipped with the ability to switch themes in the Customizer. When theme-installation is incorporated in a future release, the entire theme…

Proposed WordPress Customizer Theme-Switching UX

This is a proposal for how theme-switching and theme-installation could be incorporated into WordPress’ Customizer. This will eventually be attempted in some form as a feature-plugin to later be merged into WordPress core. The goal is to soften the distinction between themes and theme options and to make theme switching a fast, streamlined experience built-in with other Customization options in…

WordPress 4.0 Customizer API Improvements

I cross-posted much of this post to Make WordPress Core before WordPress 4.0 Beta 1. I’ll be updating this version with more examples throughout the beta period. WordPress 4.0 features several new additions to the Customizer API (see also Theme Customization API). In this post, I’ll discuss the improvements in detail. Customizer Panels The Customizer now includes a new way to…