Customizer sidebar width is now variable

A common request for the CustomizerCustomizer Tool built into WordPress core that hooks into most modern themes. You can use it to preview and modify many of your site’s appearance settings. has been to grant more room for the controls that appear in its sidebarSidebar A sidebar in WordPress is referred to a widget-ready area used by WordPress themes to display information that is not a part of the main content. It is not always a vertical column on the side. It can be a horizontal rectangle below or above the content area, footer, header, or any where in the theme.. Ticketticket Created for both bug reports and feature development on the bug tracker. #32296 was created to allow the sidebar pane to be user-resizable with a grabber just like the Dev Tools pane in Chrome can be resized. After a lot of back and forth, the scope was reduced to remove the user-resizable aspect and to instead address a more fundamental issue that the sidebar is exceedingly and unnecessarily narrow on high-resolution displays. So while 4.8 doesn’t include a user-resizable controls pane, there is still a feature plugin for possible future merge. Important to that end, the changes that have been merged begin to introduce the fundamental prerequisite for a variable-width sidebar pane: responsive controls.

As can be seen in [40511] and [40567], no longer should Customizer controls assume that their container will always be 300px wide. Given the new responsive breakpoints for high-resolution screens, the pane can now be between 300px and 600px wide depending on the screen width. And actually this has already been the case on smaller screens (e.g. mobile) where the preview and pane aren’t shown at the same time; it now also applies to very large screens where there is ample space for both the preview and a wider pane.

Custom controls in plugins and themes should utilize alternative approaches to doing layout than using pixel widths. Use of percentage-based widths or flexbox will help ensure that controls will appear properly in larger displays, while also making controls future-compatible when the sidebar width could be user-resizable.

#4-8, #customize, #dev-notes