Customize: Always Show Homepage Settings

[donalirl]

Summary

The options at Appearance → Customize → Homepage Settings are contextual. They appear only if the user has at least one published page. I am proposing tp always show Homepage Settings, regardless of the presence of published pages.

Why

When you start a new website, the first page you think about is your homepage. So, when you go to look for Homepage Settings, you may not have published a page yet. Or, maybe you start working on your homepage, but it's still a draft.

In this scenario, Homepage Settings is not there at all. A user who visited Customize would have checked there and not seen anything related to setting the homepage, so they would not think to check again for it after publishing their first page.

If Homepage Settings were to always show, a user would immediately learn where to set a homepage, even if no pages appear in the dropdown yet to select their homepage.

It's also worth noting that at Customize → Homepage Settings, you can use the 'Add New Page' option to create a new page using this interface, therefore a user with no pages yet can create their homepage here.

By always showing Homepage Settings, this will avoid the confusion a new user faces with Homepage Settings not being present in Customize.

[dlh]

Hi @donalirl, and welcome back to WordPress Trac! Thanks for this ticket and the clear rationale behind it.

Couple things that come to mind:

• The "Add New Page" button is not available when the allow_addition control parameter is false. See [38906]. It sounds to me as though the spirit of this enhancement would dictate that Homepage Settings always be shown only when allow_addition is true?
• My initial reaction was that the UX benefits of always showing Homepage Settings would be offset somewhat if the user was met with a blank dropdown and had to figure out that they needed to manually add a page before the dropdown was usable. By contrast, the Menus panel displays special text for the case where a site doesn't have any menus yet, and a tailored experience like that might do well for an always-on Homepage Settings too.

I've put this enhancement into Future Release for now; a proof-of-concept patch for broader testing and feedback would be a great next step.