WordPress Theme Developers, Save Yourself Tons of Setup Time

May 15, 2014 12:17pm

Do you design and develop themes for multiple clients over and over again? And every time you setup a new WordPress installation, what do you do? Log in, activate your theme, create a “Home” page, a “Blog” page, change the front page to static, maybe build out a “Privacy Policy” page…etc.

Sure, that only takes maybe 5 minutes to do. But 5 minutes times 100 websites equals, like, forever. Here’s how to shave some time off of that process and automate it completely.

Add the following to your functions.php file:

// programmatically create some basic pages, and then set Home and Blog

// setup a function to check if these pages exist

function the_slug_exists($post_name) {

	global $wpdb;

	if($wpdb->get_row("SELECT post_name FROM wp_posts WHERE post_name = '" . $post_name . "'", 'ARRAY_A')) {

		return true;

	} else {

		return false;

	}

}

// create the blog page

if (isset($_GET['activated']) && is_admin()){

    $blog_page_title = 'Blog';

    $blog_page_content = 'This is blog page placeholder. Anything you enter here will not appear in the front end, except for search results pages.';

    $blog_page_check = get_page_by_title($blog_page_title);

    $blog_page = array(

	    'post_type' => 'page',

	    'post_title' => $blog_page_title,

	    'post_content' => $blog_page_content,

	    'post_status' => 'publish',

	    'post_author' => 1,

	    'post_slug' => 'blog'

    );

    if(!isset($blog_page_check->ID) && !the_slug_exists('blog')){

        $blog_page_id = wp_insert_post($blog_page);

    }

}

// create the site map page

if (isset($_GET['activated']) && is_admin()){

    $sitemap_page_title = 'Site Map';

    $sitemap_page_check = get_page_by_title($sitemap_page_title);

    $sitemap_page = array(

	    'post_type' => 'page',

	    'post_title' => $sitemap_page_title,

	    'post_status' => 'publish',

	    'post_author' => 1,

	    'post_slug' => 'site-map'

    );

    if(!isset($sitemap_page_check->ID) && !the_slug_exists('site-map')){

        $sitemap_page_id = wp_insert_post($sitemap_page);

    }

}

// change the Sample page to the home page

if (isset($_GET['activated']) && is_admin()){

    $home_page_title = 'Home';

    $home_page_content = '';

    $home_page_check = get_page_by_title($home_page_title);

    $home_page = array(

	    'post_type' => 'page',

	    'post_title' => $home_page_title,

	    'post_content' => $home_page_content,

	    'post_status' => 'publish',

	    'post_author' => 1,

	    'ID' => 2,

	    'post_slug' => 'home'

    );

    if(!isset($home_page_check->ID) && !the_slug_exists('home')){

        $home_page_id = wp_insert_post($home_page);

    }

}

if (isset($_GET['activated']) && is_admin()){

	// Set the blog page

	$blog = get_page_by_title( 'Blog' );

	update_option( 'page_for_posts', $blog->ID );

// Use a static front page $front_page = 2; // this is the default page created by WordPress update_option( 'page_on_front', $front_page ); update_option( 'show_on_front', 'page' ); }

What we do here:

Create our various pages, “Blog”, “Site Map” and “Privacy Policy”, including setting their slugs, titles and content. This happens upon activation of the theme, and is setup so that it won’t overwrite or create duplicate pages.
Edit the default “Sample Page” that comes with WordPress to create our home page. This function looks much like the ones that create the three pages above, but by setting the ID to 2 (which is the ID of that “Sample Page”), we overwrite that with our home page information.
Then near the end there, we set the “Blog” page as our posts page, and the “Home” page as our front page.

With all of your newfound time, you’ll have plenty of free time to +1 me on Google. 😛

Special thanks to Nicolas Kuttler and this Pastebin from a WordPress user.

Up Next: WordPress Conditional Function for Static Home Page vs. Recent Blog Posts

Discussion

dubtempo 11 Aug 2014

Hi,

Your article was a huge help in a project I am working on, and I wanted to share an addition I made.

I was running into an issue with the slug_exists function returning true, because of menu items having the same slug as the page/post. To remedy this, I just added the following to the end of the SQL statement.

AND post_type ‐‐ 'nav_menu_item'

For anyone who might read this comment and scratch their head at the sight of ‐‐ the is basically a != (ie: not equal to).

I’m not sure if there would be any additional slug conflicts outside of the menu items, if so, the statement could be modified to test against post_type = page & post.

Thanks again for your post Nathan!

Reply
1. nathan 12 Aug 2014
  
  Glad it was useful, Dubtempo, and no worries on the code, I’ve cleaned it up. WordPress doesn’t always play nicely in the comments.
  
  Reply
dubtempo 11 Aug 2014

d’oh! the less than & greater than were stripped from my comment. Feel free to delete my comment and use what I wrote if you would like to do so, or just change the lt/gt to !=.

Reply
Mike iLL 2 Nov 2017

Great post. Helped with a plugin I’m making.

Reply
1. nathan 3 Nov 2017
  
  Glad you found it useful, Mike.
  
  Reply
Thomas 6 Jun 2018

Hi Nathan,

Thanks for the help !

Could you explain how you can define a parent page to the pages you are creating ?

For example I would like to create the parent page “Brands” (mywebsite.com/brands) and create automaticaly pages with Brand Names linked to the parent page Brands (mywebsite.com/brands/nike, mywebsite.com/brands/adidas …).

Do you have an idea ?

Thanks a lot

Reply
1. nathan 11 Jun 2018
  
  In the $homepage = array(); line, where it lists the varies arguments like post_type, post_title and so on, add a new line for post_parent. That would make it like this:
  
  $home_page = array( 'post_type' => 'page', 'post_title' => $home_page_title, 'post_content' => $home_page_content, 'post_status' => 'publish', 'post_author' => 1, 'ID' => 2, 'post_slug' => 'home', 'post_parent' => 100, // where "100" is the ID of the parent page you want );
  
  Reply
Bradon 30 Jan 2020

How do you add a template?

Reply
1. nathan 31 Jan 2020
  
  Typically via FTP, either in a Child theme’s folder or a theme you built yourself. This article is focused more on folks who already know how to create templates, themes, etc.
  
  Reply
Nick 26 May 2020

Hi Nathan,

Really useful article, thanks. Using this method, are you able to select a page template type?

Something like post_template => ‘Your custom template name’ in the array?

Thanks!

Reply
1. nathan 27 May 2020
  
  Yes, you should be able to set anything this way. Take a look in the database to see what values ‘Yourr custom template name’ actually get (do they get the Template Name, name of the php file, etc.?)
  
  Reply