When you’re shipping your theme for sell, it’s often required to bundle the required plugins. Some people just keep these plugins like general vendor libraries inside their theme and load them using php’s require_once. However, if you’re following this style, your themes will fail to pass the theme check because these plugin files will be considered as a part of your theme, and it will prompt you that CPT functions and shortcodes should be a part of the plugin. Moreover, if someone deactivate your theme, those shortcodes and CPTs will be unavailable immediately.

This is why, along with many other developers, we use TGM Plugin Activation library. This tiny little lib can force or suggest installing the plugins which are required (or good to have) for making your WordPress theme work flawlessly.

TGM can work with plugins which are hosted in WordPress plugin repository, or in a github public repository. It can also work with plugins which are shipped with the theme as a separate zip file. In this article we’ll see all these three cases of plugin installation and activation process using TGM library.

Bootstrapping

Download the TGM library from http://tgmpluginactivation.com/download/. After unzipping, keep the class-tgm-plugin-activation.php file inside vendors/tgm/ inside your theme. Then add the following code in your functions.php (more…)