This tutorial will show you how you can alert the users installing the theme that the plugin requires certain plugins to be installed.

When developing a theme you often times rely on certain plugins to add additional functionality to your theme. In this case the following theme relied on 2 Plugins. Testimonials by WooThemes, and Features by WooThemes

The following code was taken from http://www.paulund.co.uk/theme-users-required-plugins. We use it on our themes and I will explain what it does.

  1. First we’re going to hook into the admin_notices hook in wordrpess and run a function called showAdminMessages.
  2. We create our function showAdminMessages and create an empty array $plugin_messages.
  3. Since we’re going to be using the function is_plugin_active we have to require the following file
    include_once( ABSPATH . 'wp-admin/includes/plugin.php' );
  4. We then use an if statement to check if the plugin is not active !is_plugin_active to check the plugins main file.
  5. If the plugin is not active we add a message to our $plugin_messages array notifying the user that the plugin is required and a link to downlod.
  6. We then use another if statement to count our $plugin_messages array > 0 and use foreach to loop through each message and echo out a <div id="message" class="error">
  7. You can see the full code in action below.