Envato WordPress Toolkit: A must-have toolbox for the savvy WordPress developer

Have you ever purchased a theme from ThemeForest? Did you do it? great! But even if you purchase a premium WordPress theme, installing the theme may take a little longer than installing a free theme from WordPress.org. However, the folks at Envato have found a quick and easy way to install your purchased items right from your WordPress dashboard!

In this part of the “Smart WordPress Developer Toolbox” series, we’ll introduce the Envato WordPress Toolkit, a “toolkit” for installing and updating themes purchased from ThemeForest.

Steps to purchase and install a WordPress theme on ThemeForest

I’ve always thought that most people who buy WordPress themes from ThemeForest can be divided into two categories: people who buy themes for micro-businesses, and people who work for web design agencies. Let's imagine a story for each type.

Walter is the owner of his new store, "Blue Rock - Handmade Hard Candies" in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Lydia, on the other hand, works in a medium-sized web design agency in Berlin.

Walter didn't want his business to be trapped in Albuquerque and decided to expand his territory by selling his products online. Lydia just got a new card on Trello for a new client, a large company called Madrigal Elektronik.

Walter was new to the world of web design, but Lydia knew what she was in for. While Walt was searching the web and learning WordPress, Lydia had started looking for new corporate themes on ThemeForest. Eventually, Walt was convinced that he would use WordPress and found a roundup of “The 20 Best WooCommerce Themes of 2015” on the WordPress blog.

Lydia has logged into ThemeForest using her agency's account to add a modern professional multipurpose theme called Cartel to her cart, while Walt has signed up for the first time after deciding on a good-looking WooCommerce theme called Combo ThemeForest. They all pay via PayPal, but Walter earns a generous cut for the blog owner through his affiliate links. After paying, they all downloaded their respective themes.

Lydia knows what to do, but Walt needs to check the theme documentation before installing the theme on his new WordPress site. He read the instructions carefully and uploaded the theme's ZIP file in the WordPress admin panel, while Lydia quickly unzipped the ZIP file and uploaded the file via FTP to the wp-content/themes folder. (Actually, Lydia had to wait longer, as her multipurpose theme had over 600 files totaling 70 megabytes, while the single ZIP file Walt uploaded was 4 megabytes.)

After the upload is complete, Lydia navigates to the Appearance page in the admin panel and activates her new theme. Walt had already activated the theme after uploading it, and was already confused by his new theme's never-ending options panel.

Half the Process: An Introduction to the Envato WordPress Toolkit

In addition to all these extremely subtle references to the legendary TV show, you can tell that both parts deal with unreasonably long thematic installation processes. However, with the help of the Envato WordPress toolkit, we can cut that in half. silently. With a silver axe. (Okay, this is the last one.)

Install Envato WordPress Toolkit

The Envato WordPress toolkit is hosted on GitHub, not in the WordPress plugin repository, so you’ll need to download it there.

After downloading, just upload the ZIP file through the admin panel (Plugins > Add New > Upload Plugin) and activate it; or unzip the ZIP to your website's wp-content/ plugins folder and activate the plugin in the admin panel.

Enter your Envato username and secret API key

After activating the plugin, go to the new Envato Toolkit page in the main menu. In this page you should enter your ThemeForest username and API key:

You can generate an API key on the Settings > API Keys page of ThemeForest. If you can't find the page, change the USERNAME part of the URL https://themeforest.net/user/USERNAME/api_keys/edit to your username and navigate to this page.

Install the theme from the Themes tab

Installing a theme using the Envato WordPress Toolkit is actually easier than the WordPress.org theme’s built-in installer. Just go to the Themes tab and you will see your purchased themes listed. Click the Automatically install link for your desired theme and voila: your theme will be installed like a regular theme installer.

Backup the theme before updating

If your current theme version is out of date and you want to update your theme to the latest version, the Envato WordPress Toolkit will help you with the process as well. But remember: it will replace all of your current theme files with those from the new version; so if you make changes to your theme files (instead of creating a child theme), you may want to back up your current theme files beforehand. Or you can let the Envato WordPress toolkit do this for you automatically.

If already selected, simply uncheck the following box in the Envato Toolkit page:

Disable GitHub Plugin Updater

Since this plugin is hosted on GitHub, it requires a fork of the WordPress GitHub plugin updater to update itself. However, if for some reason you don’t want to update the Envato WordPress Toolkit plugin, you may need to disable future plugin updates. If this is the case, all you have to do is check the following checkbox:

Remember: You are not disabling theme updates, you are disabling plugin updates. But seriously: don't do it. Updates are important – especially when they fix security vulnerabilities.

Today’s summary

ThemeForest offers some great themes, and it doesn’t have to be expensive to create a neat collection of WordPress themes. That being said, installing a theme from your collection requires more steps than installing a theme from WordPress.org. This can be annoying, especially if you need to do this on a regular basis. Thanks to the Envato WordPress toolkit, this process is much shorter.

What do you think of the Envato WordPress toolkit? If you have anything to add, correct, or criticize, please leave a comment in the comments section below. If you liked this article, don’t forget to share it with your friends!

See you in the next part where we will discuss two gadgets: WXR File Splitter and WP Serialized Search & Replace.

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