See this pretty picture? Go check it out; WP Designer is a new plug-in that “allows you to add extra functionality to your site in a standard compliant way using customization best-practices”. So hey … it’s an easy way to tweak your WordPress site, right? WP Designer sounds like the holy grail of WordPress customization tools!

It isn’t; WP Designer is actually something even better.

As much as we love the idea of easy WordPress customization, the truth is that unless you know (more than just) a bit of CSS there will always be gotchas to contend with. But one gotcha that should be easy to fix is the placement of your customized CSS and WordPress functions.

WP Designer Completely Changes How You Manage WordPress Custom Code.

While it’s not really this simple, most of the system-wide changes you make in WordPress land either in your theme’s child theme‘s functions.php and style.css files. This is one reason you need child themes to begin with; your changes will be overridden by theme updates unless you protect them this way. But that still means that if you ever change themes you need to go hunting for any changes you want to preserve.

[clickToTweet tweet=”WP Designer: Move WordPress Customizations Out of Your Theme!” quote=”WP Designer Moves WordPress Customizations Outside Your WordPress Theme “]

WP Designer’s name may not really describe what it’s “for”, but besides the very cool benefit of liberating your custom code it does something else that might be even better. WP Designer lets you override the order in which customizations take place. So where importing your main theme’s CSS to a child renders the child subservient, changes made through WP Designer are superservient.

This means you can eliminate the absolute need for a child theme, but also means you can leave a child theme in place and use WP Designer to act as a super-moderator of theme behavior.

Know what else this means? WP Designer belongs in your WordPress customization toolbox. Simple as that.