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WordPress

Varayut Lerdkanlayanawat
PLUS
Varayut Lerdkanlayanawat
Courses Plus Student 5,439 Points
Posted by Varayut Lerdkanlayanawat
Varayut Lerdkanlayanawat
Courses Plus Student 5,439 Points

How to force a user to install required plugins for my theme?

I just studied Wordpress Development courses. The Custom Post Type UI and Advanced Custom Fields plugins are recommended in order to handle new post types in a theme.

Let's say if I wanted to use them to create a Car type and a Train type, when I public this theme, how to let a user install these plugins and have these types ready for them to use?

Thanks in advance for your help.

2 Answers

Andrew Shook
Andrew Shook
31,709 Points
Andrew Shook
Andrew Shook
31,709 Points

Well, you can simple code the post types into you theme using register_post_type. Which will take care of any post types, but will still leave ACF.

Officially, WP doesn't have a theme activation hook, but here is a tutorial for making your own. The article is old, so you may have to update the code a little. Once you get the theme activation hook going, you can then run something like this.

require_once( ABSPATH . '/wp-admin/includes/plugin.php' );
        if ( is_plugin_active( 'advanced-custom-fields/acf.php' ) ){
            require_once ( WP_PLUGIN_DIR . '/advanced-custom-fields/acf.php' );
        }else{
                  wp_die("'<div class="error"><p><strong>My Theme requires the Advances Custom Fields Plugin</strong></p></div>';");
            }
Zac Gordon
STAFF
Zac Gordon
Treehouse Guest Teacher
Zac Gordon
Zac Gordon
Treehouse Guest Teacher

We're going to get into this in our advanced theme dev course later this year :)