How to do something once when theme is activated

Yeah, I had a bit of trouble with this one too. Although functions.php is supposed to act like a plugin, some of the plugin actions ( like the key register_activation_hook) don’t work.

One workaround I used was to check for a database variable, if it’s not found (which it wouldn’t be if the theme was just installed), then do all your actions, else do nothing. The code was something like:

$check = get_option('theme_name_activation_check');

if ( $check != "set" ) {
  // DO INITIALISATION STUFF

  // Add marker so it doesn't run in future
  add_option('theme_name_activation_check', "set");
}

Then, to make sure that it all happens again should the theme be de-activated and re-activated, you can use the theme_switch action.

function delete_stuff() {
  delete_option('theme_name_activation_check');
} 

add_action('switch_theme', 'delete_stuff');

Not pretty, but it works. If anyone has any better suggestions, I would also really love to hear them…

Note that the switch_theme action is only triggered when you switch away from a theme, not into it…

I wanted to try everything with your code before replying.

Please forgive me if this is my fault…but:

No matter how I code it, the code seems not to distinguish between:

$check != “set”

and

$check = “set”

And it returns the same whether or not the theme_name_activation_check is in the options database table or not.

If I could get this solution to work it would be great.

Any comments would be appreciated.

Many thanks.

Apologies, I missed out this important part: You need to wrap the first part of the code I wrote into an action so that it gets loaded. E.g.

function first_run_options() {
  $check = get_option('theme_name_activation_check');

  if ( $check != "set" ) {
    // DO INITIALISATION STUFF

    // Add marker so it doesn't run in future
    add_option('theme_name_activation_check', "set");
  }

add_action('wp_head', 'first_run_option');

Sorry for not making that clearer. This should work now.

This now works perfectly.

Thank you so much for following this through!