Version 0.6 of our Customize Snapshots plugin has been released; it comes packaged with a set of new features that impact the way the plugin empowers more complex editorial and site management workflows. In short, the plugin provides a UI for managing Customizer changesets, including saving changesets as named drafts, scheduling them for publishing, inspecting them in the admin and previewing them on the frontend.
Big ticket items included in the release are:
- A tight integration with the changesets feature introduced to WordPress in the 4.7 core release.
- A multi-select save button that allows changes to be scheduled in addition to being published or drafted.
- Changesets can be named, similar to commit messages.
- The previewed URL and expanded panel/section are remembered when saving a changeset. The state is restored when opening the changeset in the Customizer or when previewing on the frontend, making it easy to pick up where you left off.
- Multiple changesets can be merged into a single changesets, potentially combining the work of multiple contributors in a single set of changeset that are previewed and published at once.
The plugin brings a new level of control to site owners, giving them the ability to version, batch, preview, and manage site changes made through the WordPress Customizer. You can refer to the plugin screenshots to get a full picture of its functionality, and we’ve produced the following video to give a good overview of the plugin and highlight the newer features of version 0.6:
The efforts in the Customize Snapshots plugin represent the implementation of key aspects of the Customizer Transactions proposal which was then evolved into the Customize Changesets proposal. The infrastructure aspects of the plugin have been merged as part of the changesets feature in 4.7, and so the plugin now primarily focuses on user interface aspects for changesets, some of which are currently also being designed for merging into WordPress core. As part of the vetting process, these features, via Customize Snapshots, have been implemented on a number of our XWP client projects and are proving to be highly valuable for more complex post and page management workflows.
The 0.6 release owes gratitude to a number of folk. Kudos to Sayed Taqui, Utkarsh Patel, Weston Ruter, Ryan Kienstra, Luke Gedeon and Derek Herman.
Thanks to the ongoing efforts of our friends at News Corp Australia and Beachbody who have both invested in the plugin’s development and have successfully implemented it, at scale, on their network of sites.
For full release details, you can check out the following: