Digging Into the Customizer API: What’s New in WordPress 4.0, Advanced Usage, and the Future

“WordPress’ Customizer API (also known as the Theme Customization API) provides an easy and powerful way to implement previewable options in themes and plugins. WordPress 4.0 introduces several additions to this API, enabling developers to build exponentially larger solutions into the Customizer.

In this talk, I’ll discuss the additions to the API in 4.0 as well as exploring some advanced and under-documented Customizer tricks, and discussing the future of the Customizer in core. Topics covered will include:

  • Customizer panels: a way to group sections.
  • New built-in control types: textareas and generic input support.
  • New control parameters: descriptions and input_attrs.
  • Contextual controls: implementing front-end-context-specific options.
  • Improvements to the customize_update_$type and customize_preview_$type actions, and how to use them.
  • Customizer conditional function.
  • What’s next for the Customizer in core.
  • Thoughts on customizing Settings, Menus, and Themes (that is, in-page theme-switching and previewing).

I’ve posted a tutorial summarizing many of these topics on my blog: http://celloexpressions.com/blog/wordpress-4-0-customizer-api-improvements/. We’ll go into depth with these concepts, looking at specific use-cases and examples, and answering your questions on the Customizer, its APIs, and its future.”