Mel Choyce laid out a slew of customization opportunities for the next several months.
Customization is one of three core focus areas, along with the editor and the REST API.
She defines the goal for the customizer work as this:
our goal is to help people accomplish the following:
- “I want to make a site that I’m proud of that helps me succeed.”
- “I want to make a site my clients are proud of that helps them succeed.”
The current customization flow in WordPress doesn’t generally facilitate either of those goals without a great amount of work, prior knowledge, and often a lot of additional development. That’s fine if you’ve hired an agency, or you’re a developer building yourself a website — but not fine if you’re a freelance site builder/implementer (a market I see every day in my local community) or are trying to build something for yourself with limited time and budget. If you can install WordPress, either manually or through a host, we should provide you with the tools to build out a website that accomplishes your personal and business goals.
There are nearly a dozen specific action areas then listed in the post, the majority of which have tickets so that you can get involved.
I really appreciated Helen’s comment regarding how to differentiate between editor and customization work:
For once I think we’ve managed to pick a good word for this process – customization, as opposed to building. Maybe a reasonable way to look at this in conjunction with editor improvements is that one is more about customizing things to get where you want (which implies starting with strong and smart defaults) and the other is about building out X content area. There’s definitely still overlap, but as I’m thinking through each of these focus areas, I’ve found this to be a helpful way for me to think about what the motivations and goals should be.
It definitely helps put yourself into a better mindset if you approach it this way.
In the customization meeting notes, she expresses how they’d love more comments on this post, so it’s your time to weight in.
Ian Stewart also shared some in-depth and helpful thoughts on the different types of customization someone may want to make, based on designs he’s analyzed from popular websites.
