#29173 closed enhancement (maybelater)
Register (empty) core Customizer Panels for plugins to add their sections to
| Reported by: |
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Owned by: | |
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| Milestone: | Priority: | normal | |
| Severity: | normal | Version: | 4.0 |
| Component: | Customize | Keywords: | |
| Focuses: | administration | Cc: |
Description
One of the concerns with encouraging plugins to use the Customizer rather than separate options pages (which we're doing in 4.0 with the shift from "Theme Customizer" to "Customizer" and changing "You are customizing / [theme name]" to "You are customizing / [site title]") is that too many plugins adding their own sections to the top-level of the Customizer will cause clutter.
While panels can help alleviate this issue, most plugins (and themes) really have no business creating their own panel. If we register one or more "standard" core panels that plugins can add sections to, more plugins can utilize the customizer without introducing excessive clutter (as long as they respect decisions, not options to a certain degree). This is similar to how themes frequently add their own controls to the core colors and title_tagline sections, although those can also have core controls. Section-less panels (and control-less sections) are not displayed anyway, so they would only show up if a plugin added sections to them.
The best I can come up with would be registering a fairly generic "settings" panel, which could also eventually house some less obviously front-end-related (ie, not title/tagline) settings from the core Settings admin menu subpages. Plugins are used to adding things there, and users are used to going there for plugin settings, so that may make the most sense in the Customizer as well. Top-level sections could eventually move into an appearance-type panel (if we get to the point that there are enough well-organized panels to go there), so it would be best of less-visual plugin options didn't go into the top level (but still used the Customizer).
If we can come to a consensus on what the panels should be, this could maybe be in 4.0, otherwise will need to wait.
I would love to see a panel that plugins could hook into instead of having to manually remove all the theme related controls and sections before adding your specific plugin ones. This would go a long way to making the Customizer feel like it's for everything, not just themes. Though this is not something we can do in 4.3 and a lot has changed since this ticket was opened and you can accomplish this without core support. Closing for now.