Introducing a new way to publish
The Customizer debuted as the theme customizer during “Green” or WordPress 3.4 named after Grant Green in June 2012, with features added gradually over the following years. It allowed users to set the title and tagline, adjust colors and fonts, handle some images, and make other design changes without code. It was a groundbreaking and memorable change in the editor.
The magic of the Customizer takes place in a narrow left-hand sidebar that can be seen simultaneously as the webpages rather than from the backend admin view. The Customizer allows users to see what their changes will look like before publishing them, which removed the need to switch back and forth from the editor to the preview and lessened the chances of publishing and then having to rush to undo an effect that didn’t look as expected.
While long-time designers might be able to envision how their work would look when published, the average user often found it frustrating to work hard in the editor – only to find that the result on the page didn’t look the same.
The Customizer was also intended to give developers a standardized way to present theme options.
Individual themes added more options to the settings choices in the Customizer, and in 2015 all themes were required to support the Customizer — but the Customizer for each theme continued to be individual. No consistent format was required. Different items were handled differently and presented in different places in different themes, leading to some confusion and frustration among users. However, since each theme previously had its own admin pages with no pretense of uniformity, the Customizer could actually be seen as making WordPress design easier for users.
Users didn’t all agree, and developers didn’t all comply. In 2015, when themes were officially required to support the Customizer, only 24% of the themes offered in the Theme Directory did. Adoption was lagging and as late as 2017, a survey found that more than half of regular WordPress users never used the Customizer. Would the Customizer ever catch on with the WordPress community?
“Billie” stirs controversy
From the beginning, there were designers who felt that the Customizer stifled creativity and users who found it confusing, but in 2015, with the release of 4.3, the controversy surrounding it peaked. In WordPress version 4.3, named for Billie Holiday, menus were added to the Customizer.
In addition to people who had never liked the Customizer and people who didn’t want to see even more things shoehorned into it, many felt that the Customizer should be for styling only. Menus, they said, were content, and content didn’t belong in the theme customizer.
Konstantin Obenland, a 4.3 release lead, shared some of the reactions he heard at the time:
“The Customizer is very unpleasant to work with.” “It’s crazy pants.” “I think it’s a horrible user experience and the more options that are added to it, the worse it gets.” “Content management doesn’t belong in the theme Customizer,” one commenter pronounced in the WordPress forum.
“I haven’t seen anyone outside of the decision makers who thinks this is a good idea,” said another. This viewpoint—that the developers were making choices contrary to the will and best interests of the users—became a recurring motif in the discussions.
Sara Gooding wrote, “Anti-Customizer vitriol reached its zenith last week when the Menu Customizer plugin was officially approved for merge into WordPress 4.3.”
Nick Halsey described “general and ongoing resistance to the Customizer as a whole that we’ve seen from many community members (which I think is more of an educational issue).”
The core team was called “a totalitarian regime.”
Konstantin laughed ruefully about the reaction. “It was just a UX improvement,” he said. “The goal was to make it easier to use WordPress and to encourage adoption.”
“Menus are inherently difficult,” he observed, and the original Menus interface didn’t have a preview feature. The Customizer allowed users to see the visual effect as they were constructing menus. “It gave the benefit of immediate feedback, and the people I talked to loved it.”
Designer Jay Jaro is one of the fans of the customizer. “As a designer I rely heavily on the WordPress customizer, because I’m not adept at coding scripts but have a good understanding of HTML5 and CSS3.” he said. “Beginners can set up a site easily because of the user-friendly interface. What I also like is that it allows you to see a live preview of that theme and make changes before you activate it.” Remembering his first use of the Customizer, he reminisced that it was exciting “just effortlessly placing the logo and background seamlessly.”
New users, especially designers, enjoyed the Customizer and stayed out of the emotional discussions, but reactions to the changes continued to be mixed.
Two WordPress developers reacted to the menu change by creating a plugin called “WordPress Customizer Remove All Parts” or “WP-CRAP.” It suppressed the Customizer, removing all signs of it from websites where it was installed.
WordPress 4.3 included a lot of which Konstantin was proud. It shipped on time and set off a string of on-time releases after years of missed deadlines.
It provided strong passwords by default, a feature still in use today. It made it easy to add a favicon to websites. It fixed and improved myriad small things and provided an important jumping-off point for 4.4, which included the REST API.
The Fate of the Customizer
The distinction between design and content was one of the strong points of WordPress compared with traditional HTML websites. It was possible to update a website’s design without losing the content and to update content without affecting the design.
Without a content management system, website owners could not safely change their phone numbers or update team member bios without help from tech specialists. WordPress, the world’s most popular content management system, changed that.
The Customizer can now be used in some themes to update content as well as design. Some themes are designed to allow full site editing with the block editor through the Customizer. This was one of the primary objections to adding the menu function to the Customizer with Release 4.3.
Objections didn’t end there. “Whether you like the WordPress Customizer or not, it’s not going anywhere (unfortunately),” wrote developer Anthony Hortin in 2017, following up on an earlier description of the Customizer saying, “I think the Customizer in its current form is a horrible interface, and certainly not one that should be made as ‘standard’.”
The Customizer began with the goal of standardization but has become even less standardized over time. Block themes intended for full site editing don’t require or support the Customizer and instead are customized in the Site Editor. The Customizer won’t even show up for websites with block themes unless a plugin requires it.
Universal themes allow the use of both the Customizer and the Site Editor. The Customizer can also be reached through a direct link on any WordPress website—if you know how.
The controversy around the Customizer has died down as people have either figured out how to work with it or around it. Other dramas arose to take its place as a flashpoint.