The old way of WordPress theming meant building your own customization framework through the customizer. Theme developers weren’t just creating themes – they were creating entire customization systems that didn’t transfer between themes.
Full site editing changes everything. WordPress now provides the framework with built-in controls for colors, typography, spacing, and more. When you switch themes, your customizations have a much better chance of staying intact because everyone’s using the same system.
But here’s the key: you don’t want all of WordPress’s default options available to your users. That’s where settings come in through the theme.json file. Instead of building custom controls from scratch, you choose which of WordPress’s built-in controls to show and configure the options within those controls.
This approach gives you the power to curate the editing experience while building on WordPress’s solid foundation rather than reinventing the wheel.