An exciting new feature is coming… the Template Customizer. All the premium templates have long supported the ability to be tweaked by adding options to the [connections]. For a long time now I’ve known this is not the best way to handle this as it can be complex and very intimidating, especially to those not familiar with shortcodes and how they work. Even experienced users can have a hard time due to the shear number of options available in some templates. For example, the Circled template has over 70 shortcode options. I’ve looked at several ways to better handle this and for the longest time, the way I thought would be the right way has eluded me. But no more.
WordPress introduced the Theme Customizer in version 3.4, and in each version since, they have further enhanced its capabilities, adding more and more to what can be customized. It is very obvious that this is the way forward if you’re a theme developer. I recently took a look at the Theme Customizer and I was very impressed. It made me wonder if it would be possible that this could be utilized to provide the ability to easily customize the templates for Connections. So I rolled up my sleeves, and in about a day I had a working prototype. Now, only 4 days later, this new feature is almost complete and the free default template that comes with Connections has been fully updated to support it. Take a minute to watch this little preview video.
Finally, a simple to use, fully interactive, point and click interface for customizing the templates. No more trial and error. No more wondering exactly what a shortcode option does!
I know many of you have become accustomed to and depend on the template shortcode options… So what is going to happen to all the shortcode options for the templates? The good news is that they are not going away, just greatly deemphasized. Under the hood, the way it’ll work is that the Template Customizer will set the template shortcode option defaults. If you choose, you can then use the template shortcode options to override those defaults per shortcode instance.
What this means to a novice is that they get an interactive point and click interface which will make it extremely easy to tweak the million and one template options. For the advanced user, they can set their own template defaults using the Template Customizer, and when they use the shortcode, they will still have the option to use the template shortcode options to override the settings set by the Template Customizer. For example, you can set up Slim Plus to be close to what you need globally, and on individual pages where you might need specific tweaks, you can use the shortcode options to make those tweaks.
The end result is a win for everyone!
Is there a way to add custom fields like dates, membership level, etc?
There is already repeatable dates field. As for custom fields, yes, it is possible. Here are a few links to dev doc which give examples;