2.3 Activate the Theme

Back on the themes page, it's time to activate Bonfire by clicking on the activate button. Let's go ahead and do just that. Now, you'll see this message that the theme at hand requires a number of plugins to be installed to fully function. As I mentioned earlier, one of the strengths of WordPress is the plugins that extend the things that WordPress can do on its own. Bonfire comes packaged with a number of plugins that will need install to really get the most from the theme. Let's go ahead and click on begin installing plugins to add all of these needed WordPress plugins. We don't have to install all of these but let's go ahead and check the box for all of the required plugins. In addition to that, I'll go ahead and also choose the Contact Form 7 plugin, which makes it easy to create a contact form that visitors can use to contact us. The ones that I'm going to skip include these WooCommerce plugins primarily. WooCommerce is actually a separate plugin of its own that you can add to WordPress, if you want to turn your site into a shop. Woocommerce allows you to set up a shop where you can buy and sell products, including digital products. Keep Woocommerce in mind if that fits your business model and don't forget to add these other plugins if you're a Woocommerce user. Once we have all of those selected, we'll choose install from the drop-down menu here above the list of plugins. Then we'll click on apply, and WordPress will go to work with downloading and installing those plugins for us into WordPress. It makes it easy for us to add these plugins, so that WordPress does more than it can out of the box. Once those are installed, we need to activate them so that they're usable. I'm going to click on plugins here on the left side. Let's tick the box to select all of the plugins that we've installed. Then, we'll choose activate from the drop-down menu and then click Apply. That's it, we've got the theme installed, the plugins installed and activated, and we're ready to start designing the website.