Recently WordPress.org has issued a requirement for authors of themes uploaded to their directory to include all their theme options in the native customizer of WordPress CMS. That brought a lot of controversy and many users who are unsatisfied with this change are looking to ditch using WordPress.org service and get a WordPress theme from marketplace websites where WordPress themes are abundant.
While on WordPress.org all the authors and items uploaded where verified and checked for quality, on other sites where people can purchase custom themes the verification doesn’t go too deep and a small part of the items are sold with bugs and issues that leave customers unsatisfied on some occasions. But this way site owners have the option to choose if they want to use the customizer or other options pages that have been built and developed for the last few years.
Many WordPress theme authors consider that moving the options to the native customizer is a good step, but understand that this can hurt their business. More and more authors start working on new themes or update the already developed themes to have the options set in customizer. According to some statistics only about 24% of the themes on WordPress.org support the customizer. So there will still be a lot of work to be done for authors that want to have their themes on WordPress.org’s theme directory.
Recent news have announced that two of the most popular options frameworks used in WordPress themes, Redux and Kirki are collaborating to make it easier for developers to adapt to the recent changes and add customizer options in their themes. While Kirki is compatible with Customizer API, Redux framework is not, but the result of the collaboration is going to have Redux compatible with WordPress Settings API and the Customizer API. This decision was made because some developers from the Redux team consider that Customizer API is limiting developers as it can’t present a full replacement of the settings panels.
Each major WordPress update brings some changes and sometimes these changes develop to more and other times the changes are rolled back and removed when proven to offer options that people don’t use. Is it a good idea to use the customizer or not, is for all the users from the world wide web to decide by choosing the theme with or without it. Time will prove if this change is a hard step for progressing forward or a good intention that didn’t work out as expected.