Its one of those elephants in the room and Im still suprised that it wasnt addressed much (until that point). Especially since theres going to be a crossroads when it comes to using Theme Customizer vs a custom options area (or a mix of both).

You’re right. The customizer is not for coders. It can be for companies, if they’re small enough and are on a tight budget. But essentially you’re correct – the customizer is targeted at casual end users. People who don’t know anything about code, but know they want a website.

I’m the “computer guy” in my family, and everyone asks me if they have any website questions. Some of the people I know have tried various tools (such as Weebly) to build their own sites, and then ultimately gave up and turned it over to me. There is definitely a market for easy to use tools for people interested in building their own sites, and I think WordPress would be foolish to ignore this trend. The trend can be seen in many places:

• Build-it-yourself tools such as Weebly or Squarespace
• Prepackaged SAAS solutions such as Shopify
• Highly customizable themes in WordPress

The general direction is easy for the average user. I think WordPress is wise to keep pace here.

I think/feel the WP customizer should be directed to 1 aka the casual user, the blogger, the hobbeist. The other 2 will either pay for it or are fully capable of redoing/coding it ithout a customizer (and probably will even though it may be eaiser to use the customizer, coders are like that … ;) )

When myPage is a good example of this, tons and tons of users and user friendly. People want to click and go but still have a easy way of making it “their own”.
I done a WP for my mom and taught her the basics, she wants “her style on it”, but WP is to advanced to alter for her.
My girlfriend (since +8 years, so basicly my wife, but we do not get into the whole marriage thingy …) I bought a html/CSS template on ThemeForest and redid the code so she could with easy redo aka copy/paste new pages for her needs.
If WP would direct their focus on THEM and people like them, then I think WP is on the right track. Number 2 and 3 will manage regardless and most likely never even use it.
I know I don’t.
Im a company (2) man and buy the themes I like, and for personal use I rebuild (3) free sets or remake those I bought.

Focus on the masses, not on the minorities that has either the knowledge or the money.

I love developing with WordPress. At my job, if the client budget allows, we develop with EE. But when we have to sell WordPress as solution to the clients, the initial response from 9 out of 10 clients is “I don’t need a blog”. I just dream of a day when we don’t have to make a hard-sell in order to get the client on board with it. Shouldn’t be like that, because it’s a great, extensible application, much like Matt displayed on Saturday in the State of the Word with the mapping like setup.

I think you’re right about users wanting customization options. ThemeForest is a great example: look at the top selling all-time themes. They’re basically just toolkits for building your own theme.

However, I’m not so keen on throwing everyone on ThemeForest under the bus. There are lots of high-quality developers on there, and I don’t think the Please Advise crew is slapping things together without regard for their customers, at all. I just think we have a differing opinion on where the customizer is headed and how valuable it is. For all I know, they may end up being right.

If you’re developing a one-off site for a client, the last thing the client wants to do is have to come back to the developer in order to add an image to a sidebar or modify the copyright statement in the footer. If the developer can bake that stuff right into the backend, that makes a big selling point for the client. Saving costs is always the clients #1 priority.

In the same regard, I would put money on that same fact with Themeforest customers. I’m sure on Themeforest, customers see all the customization that is available to them in the theme and go with one that makes updating their sites easier. The guys from Please Advise are simply sitting around, slapping themes together to put up on Themeforest with no regard to how the end-user is planning on using the theme.

The consensus by most developers is to make the theme great out of the box. No customization needed. In theory, that is a great idea. In a consumer world, that is the biggest mistake possible. Do you think every single person wants to wear white t-shirts and jeans? No, you offer them options. I want to wear a polo shirt and shorts. People want what they want. So basically, these developers are saying the theme is great out of the box … to them. Not everyone consumer is going to think so. I mean hey, I can think that my crap doesn’t stink too. The guy next to me may not.

But what I find, sort of, hypocritical and quite funny about the whole theme options debate is; developers have been bashing theme options for a long time, yet when WordPress implements a “Customizer” natively, it’s a great thing. The hypocrisy in that is .. they serve the same exact purpose. Allowing the end-user to modify their theme.

As for Vigilance – that feature is absolutely being fixed up in a soon-to-come version of Vigilance. It was already on our todo list, but thank you for mentioning it!

Actually, one thing it needs is to work better with multiple domains. Sadly, the one plugin I can’t disable, WordPress MU Domain Mapping, doesn’t work with the Customizer unless the default domain for a site is the same as the domain for the whole WP installation. Someone’s making a foolish assumption somewhere, I guess. No doubt it’ll get fixed eventually and then the clock will begin ticking on the future Customizer version 1.0…

Oh, and speaking of MU – I was very impressed with your Vigilance theme, but it won’t work with multiple sites. Why? Because headers have to be placed in a specific plugin directory. If you can change that, ideally by allowing headers to be handled by the Media Library, then all will be well. Just a heads-up, since as a non-payer I can’t submit bug reports any other way that I can see…

You may be right in saying the customizer will never compete with Squarespace. Squarespace’s tool is the essence of their product, so they’re going to be able to pour a lot of resources and focus into it. However, I think the customizer is still a great strategic move for 2 reasons:

1. As you mentioned, developers can take it in a million directions. It is still in its infancy, but on top of this real-time previewer we can start to see lots of interesting potential. Think frontend post editing, CSS editing, etc.
2. Whatever direction things go for #1, I still hold that this is a neutralization on the part of WordPress. It’s not meant to beat Squarespace’s tools outright. Instead, WordPress is providing an answer to the user saying “Hey, I can change my site really easily with Squarespace!“. Being able to say “You can do that with WordPress, too” is crucial, even when Squarespace does it better. Unless Squarespace does it dramatically better (making WordPress seem obsolete), WordPress has neutralized that feature.

As far as incorporating it into your existing themes, I hadn’t really thought of how much work it would take. I can see it being a big pain. It just so happens that our options framework fit nicely into the customizer. We were working on our own frontend customizer before we heard about core’s changes, so naturally we were excited and ready to integrate with the 3.4 changes.

Thanks again for stopping by. I look forward to your next shows!