WordPress 4.9 Will Allow You to Schedule Design Changes

The Gutenberg editor is making all the headlines in the WordPress world. That new editor is due to arrive in WordPress 5.0.

However, the WordPress team are moving ahead in other areas too. One very cool new feature has just been added to WordPress 4.9, which is due for release in mid-November.

This new feature allows you schedule design changes inside the Customizer.

Let's see how this new feature will work …

If you make a change in the Customizer, you will see an active “Publish” button in the top-left corner:

If you don't want to publish the changes immediately, click the cog icon next to “Publish”.

You'll now see two extra options:

• Save Draft
• Schedule

This means you can schedule design changes for your entire site.

There's also a preview link so you can show your changes to other people before they go live:

There is an autosave feature for the all of these changes, just like when you're writing content. So if you've made a lot of changes in Customizer, you won't lose those changes if you close your browser.

Next Steps for the Customizer

Once Gutenberg is finished, the WordPress team are planning to focus primarily on the Customizer.

Here are some more new Customizer features you may seen in future releases:

• Multiple drafts of pending changes.
• Schedule design changes for individual pages (In WordPress 4.9, you can only schedule design changes for your whole site).
• Revision management for design changes (as you currently have for content). This might include the ability to rollback changes.

If you're unsure about the difference between Pending Review and Draft, this video can help:

How Do The Changes Impact PublishPress?

At the moment, you can schedule all your content directly on the PublishPress calendar.

In the future, PublishPress will also support this new feature for scheduling design changes. The PublishPress calendar will make it really easy to see when you have design changes scheduled. This next image is a mockup of how it could look on the calendar:

We'll also integrate these Customizer changes with PublishPress Notifications, so you can get an email or Slack message whenever a design change happens.

If you want to see the PublishPress calendar in action, click here to try a free 7-day demo.

Read More

If you're interested in more of the technical details behind these changes, read this ticket and also this ticket on WordPress.org.

Stay tuned, and next week we'll give you a full rundown of all the new features coming in WordPress 4.9.