December 3, 2020 — This Learn WordPress workshop will explain the features of the Theme Customizer in WordPress. The customizer provides a centralized place to change options that control the look of your WordPress site. This workshop covers how to locate and use the Customizer and the options that it includes.

January 22, 2019 — When working with the WordPress customizer folks tend to create items in PHP. In this session we will look at the customizer JavaScript API to implement dynamic settings, allowing us to bring live preview to complex settings.

December 13, 2018 — Customizer is a great tool that many themes leverage to make editing the appearance and styles of your site easy. Christina will cover the basics of Customizer and how to leverage it to your advantage.

September 24, 2018 — When you need editability in various common (or uncommon!) areas of a website, it can be hard to decide how to deploy this. Do you widgetize it, create a custom options page, add custom fields to a page, use custom post types – there are a-lot of different strategies! When we need this kind of functionality on sites that we build, we’ve tried them all! I’ll demonstrate what I think is the nicest way – by using the Theme Customizer API you can deliver a great user experience, and even a live preview for the client… it’s sexy 😉

August 9, 2018 — Anthony plans to show you how you can add Customizer functionality into your theme (or plugin). He’ll cover creating Customizer Panels, Sections, Settings and Controls, including making use of the default Core Controls, and also creating your own Custom Controls.

He’ll also show the various ways in which you can update the Live Preview for your Customizer settings, and lastly, how to make use of your Customizer settings in your theme.

April 2, 2018 — The Customizer is a great tool to live preview changes to a WordPress site. And it is becoming even more: what about a staging environment or a real WYSIWYG experience for editing content?
It is time to benefit from what the Customizer has to offer. In this presentation I will try to give some examples of how you as a web developer as well as your client or user can take advantage from well-known and less well-known features of the Customizer. You can offer your users/clients controlled flexibility and ease of use when customizing their site and at the same time benefit from the available features with regard to long-term support and client satisfaction.

Presentation Slides »

December 10, 2017 — This year’s heavy focus in core has been on WordPress’s next generation Gutenberg editor. With the call to learn JavaScript deeply, it’s no surprise that Gutenberg is written in a JavaScript-first architecture. Once Gutenberg and its building blocks are in core, focus will broaden to then include Customizer. The Customizer was the first JavaScript single-page application in WordPress (added in 3.4). With the focus transition from Editor to Customizer, while keeping a JavaScript-first mindset, it is important for contributors and plugin authors that the Customizer’s JavaScript API be demystified to facilitate the integration of the new block editing interfaces. In my talk I’ll delve into the inner workings of the Customizer JS API, show how to use React to build custom controls in the Customizer, and demonstrate how to use the Customizer to preview changes to sites that use React-based themes—including previewing changes on headless REST API-driven sites.

October 17, 2017 — So you made changes to your WordPress theme using the built-in Customizer, but you would like the ability to make more changes to the look & feel of your theme, well this session is for you.

I will discuss the benefits of creating & modifying Child themes and show you how you can easily inspect and modify the css styles that control the bulk of overall design.

And if you want to dig deeper into theme customization, I will discuss the benefits of starter/foundational themes like Genesis.

Presentation Slides »

October 17, 2017 — I am cultivating a number of classes which use the Customizer API beyond the typical theme settings. I’ve also begun to build custom controls to allow for further customization of the Customizer. In this talk, I’d like to walk thru how to use the API, demonstrate the existing tools available and then show how to expand on them to better suit your specific needs.

October 12, 2017 — With all the buzz around the REST API maybe it’s been awhile since you took a look at WordPress core’s JavaScript-driven single page application (SPA), the Customizer.

In this talk we will explore how to use the Customizer to improve the user experience for theme and plugin settings, explore how the Customizer has evolved, and look at the future of the Customizer.

Presentation Slides »