How do I remove a pre-exising customizer setting?

Question

My theme doesn't use the tag line, how can I remove it from the customizer?

Answer 1

Late to the party but this will do the trick:

$wp_customize->remove_control('blogdescription');

You want to remove just that control, not entire section as suggested above.

Answer 2

I found out the WP_Customize_Manager class has a function called remove_section(). In your function hooked to customize_register you can just do:

    $wp_customize->remove_section('nav');
    $wp_customize->remove_section('static_front_page');

You can find the ID of the section (i.e. 'nav') if you inspect the accordion title bar of the section. Look at the ID of the containing <li> tag and it's the portion of the string after "customize-section-". I.E.:

<li id="customize-section-static_front_page" class="control-section customize-section">

-- the ID is "static_front_page"

Answer 3

Accoring to OTTO

One final thing you can add to a section is a “theme_supports” option. This will make the menu not appear unless the theme supports something. If you’re putting this code in a theme itself, then you already know what the theme supports, so it doesn’t make much sense. The core uses this to not show the header and background options if the theme doesn’t support them.

So I put that together with

    $wp_customize->get_setting('blogdescription')->transport='postMessage';

... and discovered that the following code worked. I put false in for the theme_supports ... not sure what I really should be putting in ... maybe someone a bit more expert can improve on this.

    $wp_customize->add_control('blogdescription')->theme_supports=false;