How To — Start A Food Blog — Import WordPress Demo Content And Install & Configure Necessary WordPress Plugins

I’m pretty sure that you buy a WordPress theme only because you loved its demo site. In other words, when you buy a WordPress theme you expect your website to look like its demo site, right?

Well, it’s not that easy. When you install a WordPress theme for the first time, it looks ugly because it doesn’t have any content or images or menus or anything else.

For instance, here is a preview of my food blog — mKitchenette (that I have created to write this tutorial) — before importing the demo content.

So let’s get started and import all the demo content (provided by the theme maker).

1. The WordPress Dashboard

When you install WordPress on your server, you get a chance to set a username and password of your choice and you get an admin URL that looks like — http://www.example.com/wp-admin/.

So, when you login successfully to WordPress, what you see first is the WordPress Dashboard (or simply the Dashboard). It gives you a quick glance of what’s happening on your blog — like the total number of blog posts and pages, comments, recently published posts, recent comments, etc.

In other words, the Dashboard is the backend of your WordPress site and it’s the place from where you can manage everything on your blog. Here different options are available — to publish a new blog post, create a new page, approve a comment, change settings, etc.

And you can also see the different WordPress menus (Posts, Media, Pages, Comments, Appearance, Plugins, Users, Tools, Settings) and its submenus on the left sidebar.

2. WordPress Help

“Help” is a context-specific menu that’s available on all WordPress pages so that you can get help for the current screen.

3. WordPress Screen Options

“Screen Options” are also context-specific and it lets you customize the WordPress screen that you are looking at. That is, you can use the Screen Options tab (located at the upper right corner of your screen) to personalize individual WordPress Dashboard sections (like Posts, Pages, Comments, etc.).

So, if there are options that you don’t use, you can disable them. And you can always bring them back later if needed. For instance, on the Dashboard, you can remove the items you don’t use, like ‘Welcome’, “WordPress Events and News’, or ‘Quick Draft’. That way, the screen can be made to look less cluttered and more in line with what you need to focus.

4. WordPress Updates

“Updates” allows you to check whether you have installed the latest version of WordPress and it also shows whether your Themes or Plugins are up-to-date or not. If there’s an update available for your WordPress site, then you will see a notification in the Toolbar (top) as well as the Sidebar (left).

5. Updating Process

Upgrading WordPress is a simple one-click process. All you need to do is click “Update Now” when you see a new version and WordPress will automatically do it for you. And to update themes and plugins, you can select all the plugins or themes that you want to update, and then click “Update Plugins” or “Update Themes” button.

6. WordPress Plugins

WordPress Plugins are independently developed by third-party developers across the world. Plugins extend the functionality of your WordPress site (just like we add new features and functions to a web browser like Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox) with custom features.

7. WordPress Import

You have to install the plugin WordPress Importer to import the demo content. Go to WordPress Dashboard > Tools > Import, click “Install Now” (to import WordPress files).

8. WordPress Importer

Click “Run importer” and it lets you import your theme demo content (or content you have manually exported from another WordPress site).

9. Import WordPress

Just in case, the Foodie Pro demo content is located inside the “sample-data” folder of the unzipped theme folder.

Choose the file foodiepro.xml (to import content + images) and click the “Upload file and import” button.

10. Import Foodie Pro Demo Content

You can assign a new author or choose an existing author for the demo content. And check the box next to “Download and import file attachments”.

11. Imported Foodie Pro Demo Content

You can ignore simple errors as long as the content is imported successfully.

12. mKitchenette Preview (After Importing Demo Content)

And that’s the preview of mKitchenette (after importing the demo content). Just in case, here’s a screenshot of the full mKitchenette preview.

As you can see, the WordPress Importer plugin successfully imported all the blog posts and pages and images but the widgets are missing. However, if you read the Foodie Pro documentation you can see that you have to install all the necessary plugins to import the demo widgets.

It includes the following plugins:

• Widget Importer and Exporter
• Genesis Enews Extended
• Simple Social Icons
• Genesis Simple Share
• WP Featherlight
• WP Instagram Widget

How To Install A WordPress Plugin (Step-by-Step)

Here’s how you automatically install and activate a new WordPress plugin from the official WordPress Plugin directory.

13. WordPress Installed Plugins

Installed Plugins shows a list of all the plugins that you have installed and it even categorizes the plugins into All, Active, Inactive, and Update Available (plugins that are not up-to-date). You can activate or deactivate an installed plugin from here. And if there is a new version of a plugin that you have already installed, then it will show an “update now” link.

Click “Add New” to install a new plugin from the official WordPress plugin directory or by manually uploading one from your computer.

14. Add New WordPress Plugin

Use the search box to find the plugin that you are looking for. Or, use the “Upload Plugin” button to manually upload and install a plugin that you have downloaded or purchased elsewhere.

15. Install A WordPress Plugin

When you find the plugin that you are looking for, click “Install Now”.

16. Activate WordPress Plugin

When a new plugin is installed successfully, you will see the “Activate” button.

17. (Bulk) Activate WordPress Plugins

Likewise, install and activate all the necessary plugins (by following the above steps):

• Widget Importer and Exporter
• Genesis Enews Extended
• Simple Social Icons
• Genesis Simple Share
• WP Featherlight
• WP Instagram Widget

18. Activated Recommended WordPress Plugins

Activate the plugins one by one or all of them at the same time using the bulk activate option.

19. All WordPress Plugins

And that’s the list of all plugins that are recommended by the theme maker — activated.

20. Widget Importer & Exporter Plugin Settings

As you have already installed all the necessary plugins, go to WordPress Dashboard > Tools > Widget Importer & Exporter, and choose the file foodieprowidgets.wie (like you imported the demo content).

21. Imported Foodie Pro Demo Widgets

Now that you have successfully imported all the demo widgets.

22. mKitchenette Preview (After Importing Demo Widgets)

Don’t see what you were expecting? Well, here is a full preview of mKitchenette (after importing demo widgets) and you can see that the Widget Importer & Exporter plugin has successfully imported all the demo widgets. It’s just that the header part is filled with default WordPress widgets.

23. Default WordPress Widgets

“Widgets” are more commonly known as sidebars because it was originally used to customize the sidebar (with a search bar, popular posts, recent comments, etc.) of a WordPress site. Today it’s also used to create and customize the homepage or inner-pages (when the theme is created to customize that way). When you enter Widgets, it shows a list of “Available Widgets”, “Widget Area” (or active widgets), and “Inactive Widgets”.

Available Widgets shows all the individual widgets that you can use on your WordPress site. You can reuse the same widgets as many times as you want — provided the theme that you are using supports it. The available widgets and the widget area depends upon the theme that is currently active. You can drag and drop widgets from one widget area to another. And when you have customized a widget you can click “Save” or can click “Delete” to permanently remove a widget that you no longer need.

WordPress also has an “Inactive Widgets” area and it’s like a reusable trash. You can drag and drop widgets from your active widget area to Inactive Widgets so that you can reuse it later (without losing the data). It’s particularly useful when you want to change your WordPress theme and keep the settings of your old widgets.

Go to WordPress Dashboard > Appearance > Widgets and you can see that the default WordPress widgets are still showing on top.

24. WordPress Widgets (Before Removing Default WordPress Widgets)

Remove all the default widgets from the “Header Right” widget area.

25. WordPress Widgets (After Removing Default WordPress Widgets)

All the default WordPress widgets are gone now.

26. mKitchenette Preview (After Removing Demo Widgets)

And that’s the preview of mKitchenette after removing all the default WordPress widgets. Just in case, here is a full preview of mKitchenette (after importing the demo widgets and removing the default widgets).