customizer view has no selector field

actually I took a further look with firebug and noticed all the fields are there, but some are missing and set to “display:none” by the plugin. Is there a reason why they are set to display:none or is this simply the issue and needs to be set to display:block or summink? I dont have styling that is interfering, as the styling seems to be applied as inline styling by the plugin itself. Are you able to clarify what is going on?

hmm – unfortunately cant edit or fine tune any of the entered selectors in the settings page – if anything is not right the whole entry has to be deleted and re-entered.
I also noticed that on the customizer page (after exposing the hidden fields via css) that upon saving, the url generated is so long it violates server limitations on url length. Maybe not with all hosting providers, but it did no my local xampp install, and again on my live site with (cringe) Crazy Domains.

this plugin is most of the way to being a well oiled solution – these are just cobwebs. I beg you to clear these cobwebs and sell this thing – I WILL PAY!!

Hi yunuck,

I’ve not updated the screenshots I’m afraid (that’s on me, I must admit I had completely forgotten to do so), I cut down and simplified the plugin view in the customizer screen as the large amount of options that was displayed by default was somewhat confusing to a lot of users.

All you should need to do is click the Find something to customize button and you can then click what you wish to customize in the screen it self, once you’ve made a selection more options should become available to you (the option to set a label, what attribute such as color, font and so on, and what to categorize this customization as). So the fields are hidden intentionally, and displayed conditionally when the time is right for them (not all of them will be displayed though, some are just there in the background to populate data fields in the plugin)

I’ve not experienced the save issue causing the URL to be too long, but that is definitely something I will look into and include a fix for!

And yes, I plan on doing a bit more with the list of existing customizations to allow for edits instead of having to re-create it.

I totally understand that plugins are often installed by novice users with no real css understanding and the selector field may confuse them. On the other hand, hiding it is removing a very useful function for someone who actually does know what they are doing and it adds real power to the plugin. There you have a conundrum – who do you try to please? Without the field, the problem is that selecting elements is rarely accurate. If I want to change a background and I click to select an area, it may think I want to chage an element that is infront of the containing div – next thing you know the user is confused because the color picker is changing the paragraph text colour and not the background. How can they amend this? WIthout the selector field, they cant. How many times can a novice user stab in the dark trying to get the background to change colour before they mistakenly think your plugin is no good? Could I suggest an approach that will satisfy both sides? A checkbox setting in the settings page which allows the field to be exposed. By default it is off, so you still are in the situation you are in now, but people like me can turn it on and make good use of it. This way you are not “dumbing your plugin down” when it is so useful to web designers like me who can seriously benefit from it. I have been an application development manager and in IT for about fifteen years – please believe me when I say that you are on to something here – I have been looking absolutely everywhere for a way of using the same theme for every job I do, but with a really versatile and fast customising function. I have tried the microthemer plugin – good, but yours is faster and more to the point.

If you can do this, make the settings page entries editable so they can be fine tuned (their only option at the mo’ is delete as you know) and somehow address the very long url strings on save when in the customizer page, this would be a revolutionary plugin with no other one like it out there.

There are other ones, but they only work with certain themes (in other words, their selectors and choices are hard coded) – with your ability to choose any css element, yours can customize anything.

If this did the above, and this was on code canyon for $50, I would buy it without a hiccup. I have looked for premium plugins that do this, and there arent even any. Microthemer is $99 or summink and I prefer this.

The closest match to this I can find which is currently being supported is font customizer, but it only does fonts. As I said, yours does ANYTHING. Please dont throw away one of the most useful fields that allow it to do this really effectively because someone (who I bet does NOT design sites like me) didnt know what to do with it!

Lets also remember that while some people did not know what to do with it, plenty would. Please dont ignore that audience.

Some thoughts:

a) when adding a new font there is a wordpress failure notice. I found the problem in fonts.php line 29 where there is a typo in the wp_nonce_field function that says:
“simple-customizee-add-font” instead of “simple-customize-add-font” which works fine after that.
b) there is also another typo in line 105 of the same file “siomple-customize-plugin” which doesnt seem to affect anything, but why not let you know anyway.
c) ability to edit customisation entries in settings page, and somehow manage their order. This is a real piece of useability that needs to be added, imagine needing to fine tune selectors – at the moment you can only delete and enter it all again, and when doing so have no choice over putting it back in the position it was before, or having any choice over the priority order. (ajax drag and drop would be super cool, but entering a priority number would do the job)
d) you already have developer mode – just extend that a little bit more so the developer can enter the selector in the customiser view. THe field is already there, so I gather it wouldnt be too much trouble to add another checkbox to expose it.(I know I said this before – just adding it here for the sake of consolidating).
e) not that important, but the ability to export the css (not quite the same as import / export of settings which it already does so I dont mean that) but by being able to export the css means you can have a reliable “backup” of what the plugin was doing – if it ever becomes obsolete in future as the website gets older, exporting the css means you always have a plan B to reinstate what was achieved with the plugin (more the requirement of a web designer with clients than the one off users concern of course). This is just cherry on top stuff, not overly crucial.

Please excuse my long winded successive comments building up here – I am very excited about the potential of your plugin in terms of what a web designer with clients can achieve with it, and it falls short by about 2% of being absolute genius perfected.

I am happy to email you privately about what my donation for this would be if you are interested in doing the above.

Glad ot hear you’re quite excited about the plugin.

I did just push 1.4 which addresses some of the concerns, as well as some bug fixes I had in the pipeline.

I included the ability to edit customization options now, this will need a bit more work as I came upon some limitations that will require a bit more code than I suspect I have time for this weekend, but the basic functionality is definitely there for now.

I’ve also fixed the font adding, this was one of the fixes already laying in wait, the other one you mentioned is just related ot translations, and thus wouldn’t be a visible problem.

I also had a quick look at your problem with the URL length in the customizer and included a quick fix for this.

If you don’t mind, would you consider tagging the thread as resolved if you feel the initial questions have been addressed. This is just for my own sanities sake, as we’ve moved more over into the lands of feature requests and not a support thread.