One of the hardest things for people setting up sites with WordPress for the first time is understanding what themes are and how a given theme can work for you, especially when there’s no content there to visualize. There are also significant gaps between local theme previews, screenshots, and .org previews. Even when there are easy-to-use site customization tools, it is difficult to figure out where to start and what things are going to be like.

To help users along that path, 4.7 introduces the concept of “starter content” – theme-specific selections of content to help showcase a theme to users and serve as a starting point for further setup of new sites. Starter content works especially well in tandem with visible edit shortcuts, allowing users to not only see what content might work best where within a theme, but from there to be able to jump to building off of that base without having to initially spend time figuring out, say, which widgets areas map where.

How it works

Starter content is applied and displayed upon entering the customizerCustomizer Tool built into WordPress core that hooks into most modern themes. You can use it to preview and modify many of your site’s appearance settings., with no changes appearing on the live site until customizer changes are explicitly saved and published. In 4.7, this initial view of a theme with starter content will only happen for “fresh sites” – new installs that have not yet had any posts, pages, widgets, or customizer settings updated. This state is indicated in the fresh_site option with a value of 1 . The current limitation is in line with prioritizing initial site setup for this release, and allows for themes to begin implementing content and ensuring that there is a solid base before introducing more complicated logic and UIUI User interface to “merge” starter content with existing content in a future release (#38624). That being said, if two themes in a given fresh site both have starter content, if the starter content from the first theme is applied and you make some changes to that starter content, when you switch to the second theme the starter content from that theme will override the starter content from the first theme only for the settings which have not been modified. Also remember that theme mods are always theme-specific, so starter content for theme switches will never be copied.

CoreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. provides a set of content that themes can select from (technical details below). These include a variety of widgets, pages, and nav menu items (including references for the pages), along with the ability to provide attachments, theme mods, and options. Any included images for attachments need to be from within a theme or pluginPlugin A plugin is a piece of software containing a group of functions that can be added to a WordPress website. They can extend functionality or add new features to your WordPress websites. WordPress plugins are written in the PHP programming language and integrate seamlessly with WordPress. These can be free in the WordPress.org Plugin Directory https://wordpress.org/plugins/ or can be cost-based plugin from a third-party folder and cannot be loaded from an external URLURL A specific web address of a website or web page on the Internet, such as a website’s URL www.wordpress.org. Twenty Seventeen will ship with starter content enabled; there are no plans to add the functionality to past default themes.

How to use it

Themes define a subset of core-provided starter content using add_theme_support() – let’s look at a breakdown of how Twenty Seventeen does things. In its setup function hooked to after_setup_theme , we see an array with collections of widgets, posts (pages), attachments, options, theme mods, and nav menus registered as the starter content. The customizer looks for this starter-content at after_setup_theme priority 100, so do make this call at that point or later:

add_theme_support( 'starter-content', array( /*...*/ ) )

Widgets

Each widgetWidget A WordPress Widget is a small block that performs a specific function. You can add these widgets in sidebars also known as widget-ready areas on your web page. WordPress widgets were originally created to provide a simple and easy-to-use way of giving design and structure control of the WordPress theme to the user. area ID corresponds to one sidebarSidebar A sidebar in WordPress is referred to a widget-ready area used by WordPress themes to display information that is not a part of the main content. It is not always a vertical column on the side. It can be a horizontal rectangle below or above the content area, footer, header, or any where in the theme. registered by the theme, with the contents of each widget area array being a list of widget “symbols” that reference core-registered widget configurations. Most default widgets are available ( archives , calendar , categories , meta , recent-comments , recent-posts , and search ), as well as text widgets with business hours ( text_business_info ) and a short prompt for an “about this site” style blurb ( text_about ). Themes should place widgets based on what works best in that area – for instance, business info in a footer widget of a business-centric theme, or a nicely styled calendar widget in the sidebar of a blogblog (versus network, site).

Custom widgets can also be registered at the time of starter content registration or later filtered in, which will be more likely the case for plugins, as add_theme_support() for starter content will be overridden by any later calls.

// Custom registration example add_theme_support( 'starter-content', array( 'widgets' => array( 'sidebar-1' => array( 'meta_custom' => array( 'meta', array( 'title' => 'Pre-hydrated meta widget.', ) ), ), ), ); // Plugin widget added using filters function myprefix_starter_content_add_widget( $content, $config ) { if ( isset( $content['widgets']['sidebar-1'] ) ) { $content['widgets']['sidebar-1']['a_custom_widget'] = array( 'my_custom_widget', array( 'title' => 'A Special Plugin Widget', ), ); } return $content; } add_filter( 'get_theme_starter_content', 'myprefix_starter_content_add_widget', 10, 2 );

Posts (Pages)

Like widgets, core provides posts which can be referenced by symbols; all six currently in the core set are pages, but the starter content APIAPI An API or Application Programming Interface is a software intermediary that allows programs to interact with each other and share data in limited, clearly defined ways. can support various post types (including attachments, which are defined and handled separately). The symbols for the core-provided pages as of 4.7 are home , about , contact , blog , news , and homepage-section . The pages references by blog and news are both empty in the content area and are meant to be assigned as the page for posts (detailed with options below). Imported posts can further be used as post IDs when referenced using the symbol of the item within double curly braces, e.g. {{home}} for the static front pageStatic Front Page A WordPress website can have a dynamic blog-like front page, or a “static front page” which is used to show customized content. Typically this is the first page you see when you visit a site url, like wordpress.org for example. option.

Posts, like widgets, are also easily customizable, either by overriding specific fields for a predefined item or by defining a new custom one entirely. The available fields are post_type , post_title , post_excerpt , post_name (slug), post_content , menu_order , comment_status , thumbnail (featured imageFeatured image A featured image is the main image used on your blog archive page and is pulled when the post or page is shared on social media. The image can be used to display in widget areas on your site or in a summary list of posts. ID), and template (page template name, as would be stored in post metaMeta Meta is a term that refers to the inside workings of a group. For us, this is the team that works on internal WordPress sites like WordCamp Central and Make WordPress.).

// Overriding/supplementing a predefined item plus a custom definition add_theme_support( 'starter-content', array( 'posts' => array( 'about' => array( // Use a page template with the predefined about page 'template' => 'sample-page-template.php', ), 'custom' => array( 'post_type' => 'post', 'post_title' => 'Custom Post', 'thumbnail' => '{{featured-image-logo}}', ), ), );

Attachments

While attachments are post objects, they have special handling due to the sideloading of specified media. Media must be loaded from within the theme or plugin directory – external URLs are currently disallowed for performance reasons. The location of the media, either as a full file path or relative to the theme root, is indicated in the file array item, and some other post fields are available, with post_content mapping to description and post_excerpt to caption. Imported attachments can further be used by using their respective array keys as symbols used within double curly braces, e.g. {{featured-image-logo}} as the featured image ( thumbnail ) for a post. In the example below, an attachment is specified and used as the featured image for the about page.

add_theme_support( 'starter-content', array( 'attachments' => array( 'featured-image-logo' => array( 'post_title' => 'Featured Logo', 'post_content' => 'Attachment Description', 'post_excerpt' => 'Attachment Caption', 'file' => 'assets/images/featured-logo.jpg', ), ), 'posts' => array( 'about' => array( // Use the above featured image with the predefined about page 'thumbnail' => '{{featured-image-logo}}', ), ), );

Nav Menus

Nav menus are also specially treated post objects. There are essentially two types of nav menu items – custom links, which require a title and url , and object references, which require type , object , and object_id , which can be a {{post}} symbolic reference.

Options and Theme Mods

Options and theme mods are more freeform and merely require a match for a name. Symbolic references to imported items are particularly useful here, such as for the page_on_front option and Twenty Seventeen’s multi-section homepage as stored in theme mods. Themes hosted on .org will likely be limited to theme mods and a subset of options; all other developers are encouraged to consider user experience and expectations first.

What does this mean for themes?

Core-provided content helps support a consistent preview experience across themes with high quality localized content, helping users understand how WordPress and that theme fit their needs. Theme authors are encouraged to select from core-provided content, but as is always the case with WordPress, starter content still has some flexibility, and will continue to mature as a feature over time.

While theme review guidelines need to be finalized and documented, it is anticipated that themes being submitted to WordPress.orgWordPress.org The community site where WordPress code is created and shared by the users. This is where you can download the source code for WordPress core, plugins and themes as well as the central location for community conversations and organization. https://wordpress.org/ will be expected to select from core-provided content to promote consistency and to help keep the theme review process from becoming lengthier, with exceptions being made on a case by case basis. Themes being distributed outside of WordPress.org are not subject to the same review process; however, it is recommended that consistent user experiences be the primary consideration in how starter content is chosen and implemented.

What’s next?

Testing this feature with your theme or plugin does not require a fresh install every time – you can set the fresh_site option to 1 using the tool of your choice, such as wp-cliWP-CLI WP-CLI is the Command Line Interface for WordPress, used to do administrative and development tasks in a programmatic way. The project page is http://wp-cli.org/ https://make.wordpress.org/cli/ or phpMyAdmin. Do note that content merging logic has not been tackled so you may not quite get the exact same effect as a truly fresh install; however, since all of the changes are held in a customizer changeset and are not otherwise live on the site, there is no data loss, unless you save and publish the starter content overrides of course.

In the future, all sites should be able to live preview new themes in ways that really showcase that theme’s capabilities, whether that’s with no content made yet or with a lot of existing content to work into the preview. This will take a lot of consideration around user expectations for content merging, and should be tackled as its own feature. There are also potentially interesting extensions such as UI for users to select from sets of content or selectively accept/reject staged changes.

And finally, to best align preview experiences in various places, theme previews on .org should also leverage starter content. Helping hands are needed here – please pingPing The act of sending a very small amount of data to an end point. Ping is used in computer science to illicit a response from a target server to test it’s connection. Ping is also a term used by Slack users to @ someone or send them a direct message (DM). Users might say something along the lines of “Ping me when the meeting starts.” me (@helen) in SlackSlack Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/. should you be interested!