Remove the Customizer / move it to a Core plugin

Businesses do not need the Customizer as they hire developers to customize on their behalf. Business owners simply want a functional website and they certainly don’t have time to fuzz around in a sidebar with sliding elements.

This petition therefore aims to remove the thing altogether.

Possibly the Customizer Remove All Parts-plugin which hasn’t been updated for more than 2 years can be used as a starter?


Read-only archive: Issues · ClassicPress/ClassicPress · GitHub

Author: Pieter Bos

Vote count: 39

Status: open

Tags:

  • difficulty-hard
  • request-remove-feature

Comments

Don’t use the Customizer. The Settings API is still there and you can still use that for options.

Themes can still be developed with the old system. This way developers can use what ever system they prefer.

Try testing several themes on your site without disrupting how it appears to your visitors. You will appreciate the Customizer more.
Try implementing several CSS or theme option changes for your client’s site and get the client approval before the change by sending a single link for them to preview the change. You will appreciate the Customizer more.

I think the Customizer used to be very slow, but it was improved a lot right before Weston left to work for Google.
It is a lot better than having different settings pages for each theme.

4 Likes

I agree that the Customizer is a lot better then the Settings API. Speed isn’t really a problem because it is only the developer or site owner who uses the Customizer. Options remain stored in a single array in the database, if it’s done properly.

Once you use it, you find it much simpler, and easier to use them a multi page options system from the Settings API.

I’m against removing the Customizer from CP.

Devs may know how to setup a site without the Customizer, but not all CP users are devs.

The most often mentioned reasons to remove customiser so far as far I see have been:

  • I hate it (that is not a reason. that is frustration talking and usually hate stems from ignorance)
  • I do not want the client to mess up his/her site (Big lol. Do you also lock the client from install and activate plugins, deactivate them, change theme, edit code? They can mess up exactly nothing in the customiser unless a few colors and images. Unless of course the “experienced” developer here had the magic idea of adding some next level settings to the customiser.)
  • Performance issues (I have never seen that, but this would, if happening, be a true valid reason to react. However I believe these performance issues are not due to Customizer, rather to other bad code or lists of things on that page which since a preview, will load these queries…).

All in all, most of the reasons why this should be removed for me are factually no real reasons.
Bloat, too much work required to actually make your new settings work both in setting and preview, performance are basically never mentioned and would be considerable reasons, IMO, to remove the customiser and put it into a Core Plugin.

But, just to repeat what has been said that “disabling Customizer to make it impossible for clients to screw up their site”… so what will happen when the client then decides to remove customiser, but his theme uses it, and he will not know that right? Because the client obviously seems clueless and has no idea what soever how to use a customiser, so how should the client know what he can disable or enable?
So removing customiser, but having thousands of themes requiring or using it (since CP has no themes so far, we rely on WP themes), is safer? That literally makes no sense to me.

And as for “Businesses do not need the Customizer”, I have to ask, what sort of Business does not need the customiser and has to be kept from editing a simple detail like a logo or tagline, because they might mess up things, but then can anytime they want open theme code editor and really mess around.
I do work for businesses, since several years now, and actually, all of them use the customiser. They insist on it. Because their clients want to edit their sites easily. And PHP is not as easy as typing a new tagline in a visual editor. Those are business who sell things to hundreds of clients. Like, design houses and firms selling entire www presences to their clients. They don’t want their clients to come back for editing a tagline, They want to empower them to do that stuff on their own. Everything else is actually similar to clickbait. I create a website for you, but you need to contact me to change the tagline or logo? Lol, me as a client, I would ask you “Why then do I even consider WP? so you as a dev can install a plugin and then lock me from using it?”
Seriously, I don’t see what sense that makes other than client retaining and money sucking of things that they should be able to do on their own, that is what WP is all about, and also CP. IMO, but not only.

So, even if I personally rarely use the customiser myself and I am all for lean stuff, and find coding for it relatively redundant because of its duplicate work needed (actual setting and JS preview stuff), the reasons to remove this stuff presented here in this topic and other topics like the one where the now disappeared ZP Remove Customizer plugin was presented, are (for me) invalid and should not be considered to even touch a single line of code in a project.
Hate and Control for me are no reasons to listen to people.

1 Like

To declare my interest here I dislike Customizer, but I see a lot of people do use it.

So, I would still propose it is move to a ‘Core Plugin’.

This functionality is not needed all the time. Nor is is needed by all users. The code base is bloat for anyone (like myself) that doesn’t use it.

To be perfectly honest, even though I am the only person operating my sites, I still block access to it on my sites due to the database bloat it creates. So, it’s not a deal breaker for me if it stays in, as I still won’t see it.

But the code base to maintain for ClassicPress is huge with a currently limited number of active developers. Splitting some functionality into plugins reduces the core code size and may well make maintaining these core plugins easier in the future, encourage developers into smaller projects (hopefully at first) and may see them enhanced rather than just maintained.

2 Likes

I agree with @MattyRob 100%.

On the fence with this one. Is there an abstained choice? LOL.

Customizer is “cool” but in ClassicPress we could still use Theme Options API as long as the them was not submitted to wp.org for TRT.

The progress on the core plugin will be tracked here: