This week WordPress.com introduced a new Customizer panel to its users called Content Options. The new panel offers a number of minor tweaks that would ordinarily be handled by a few simple free plugins on a self-hosted site. It brings a whole new range of customizability to the WordPress.com sites that was not previously available.
Content Options have been launched across the network with a handful of features that WordPress.com plans to expand:
Blog Display: choose between displaying the full content of each post or an excerpt on the blog and category, tag, and date archive pages. A “default” option is also available for themes that mix excerpts and full posts based on post format.
Author Bio: Hide the author bio on single posts.
Post Details: Show or hide the post date, tags, or categories.
“We also plan to add support for modifying other elements in the future, including the ability to hide featured images and author names,” Automattic Theme Wrangler Thomas Guillot said in the announcement. More than 30 themes on WordPress.com currently support Content Options and all new free themes will be built with support for the new Customizer panel.
Guillot also confirmed that the Content Options is a plugin that Automattic is aiming to include in Jetpack in the future, although he could not provide an ETA. If it does eventually get shipped with Jetpack, self-hosted users who use a combination of plugins to provide the same functionality will be able to drop them in favor of turning on a Jetpack module. Many theme authors already support popular Jetpack features, such as sharing buttons, the contact form, and galleries. Content Options is a handy customization feature that may be the next module to receive widespread support from theme authors.