The customizer is a lot easier to use. Lets look at a screen shot of the customizer. Here we customizing the Turbine user page. You can see the four menu options listed.
When customizing menus, you can add panes to the menu.
Clicking the add pane button adds another menu option. The layout has MenuPane selected, which could be switched to TabPane (combination of TabControl + CardPortletController). With the Customizer, menu options can be moved up or down, added and deleted.
Once the menus and panes are defined, you can then move on to placing portlets on the panes by clicking on the specific menu option, which will then bring up a pane customizer for placing portlets. But first, lets have a look at site security.