Live preview, via the customizer, is the best way to make site management easy for your clients and in your products. Anything can be live previewed out of the box, and with a little work, the live preview experience can become instant and compelling. WordPress core comes with several advanced Customizer controls that developers can use with only a few lines of code. There’s a color control, a media control with support for anything from images and audio to PDFs, and most importantly, the ability to create your own custom controls based off of these.
We’ll see how easy it is to leverage these specialized controls in themes and plugins, and show how you can extend them to build advanced custom controls without starting from scratch. I’ll also explain postMessage and Selective Refresh, and show you how to use them to make site management fun for your clients.