Customizer

WordPress 4.7 was released with a ton of great new features (which you can check out here), including some user experience and user interface upgrades to the theme Customizer. In case you’re hearing about the Customizer for the first time, it’s a feature in the WordPress admin (go to Appearance > Customize) that allows users to tweak theme settings using a WYSIWYG interface and customize a theme’s colors, fonts, text, and pretty much anything else you want to change. In this post, I’ll walk you through how the Customizer can be used in themes to create a better user experience and...

Now that WordPress 4.7 has been released, most people will notice an “Additional CSS” section in the customizer when they update. This is an awesome feature and a perfect use of the customizer. It’ll be great for the vast numbers of users who just need to add some basic CSS to customize their theme. However, for many of us, it’s an unwanted feature on our own sites for one reason or another. This tutorial is going to walk you through disabling this feature based on your situation. Remove directly from customizer If you just want to get rid of the...

The WordPress theme customizer is famous for being able to change your theme colors in real time, but did you know it can handle almost any type of theme option? You can add layout options, image uploaders, text fields, and lots more. The possibilities are endless! There is almost no need for theme options pages anymore. I personally like the idea of having no theme options page, and limiting everything to the theme customizer. I’m going to show you how to add a custom logo uploader to your theme customizer, then display it in place of the site title and...

The theme customizer feature was introduced in WordPress 3.4, released June 2012. Since then, it's been a great tool that's allowed theme developers to move away from complex options managers to a simpler, more logical interface where many settings can even be live previewed. Over the last couple of years, there have been a few really great resources written for utilizing the theme customizer and extending it. There are a few I think you should read if you are getting serious about the customizer. Resources for working with the theme customizer Theme customization API on the Codex Samuel “Otto” Wood on the...