Installing Salient's Plugins

Salient adds a set of its own plugins, some required and some optional. You install and activate all of them from a single screen in the WordPress admin. There is nothing extra to buy, and nothing to download or upload yourself.

Do this before importing a demo. A demo imported without the page builder active will show pages full of raw shortcodes.

The notice

After activating Salient, every admin screen shows a notice listing what is still inactive. Its Begin installing plugins link (or Begin activating plugins, once they are installed) goes straight to the screen you need.

Dismissing the notice does not install anything. If you have already dismissed it, use the menu instead.

Where the screen lives

Go to Appearance > Install Plugins.

Appearance > Install Plugins

This menu item is added by the theme and only appears while something still needs installing or activating. Once every plugin is active it disappears, which is the confirmation that you are done.

If the item is missing and you have not installed anything yet, check that Salient is the active theme under Appearance > Themes.

Installing and activating

The screen lists every plugin available to the theme, its type, and its current status.

Appearance > Install Plugins. Click to view full size.

The fastest route is to do them all at once:

1. Tick the checkbox in the table header to select every plugin.
2. Choose Install from the Bulk actions dropdown, then press Apply. WordPress unpacks each one in turn and reports as it goes.
3. Back on the same screen, select everything again, choose Activate from Bulk actions, and press Apply.

You can also work one row at a time using the Install and Activate links under each plugin name.

Installing a plugin is not enough on its own. A plugin that is installed but not activated does nothing, and the notice keeps appearing until you activate it.

Reading the Type column

Type	What it means
Required	Salient does not function properly without it. Salient Core and Salient WPBakery Page Builder are both required.
Optionally Included	A feature you may or may not want. Install the ones you need and skip the rest; you can come back and add them at any time.

Not sure which of the optional ones you want? Each is documented in Plugins, with a badge saying whether it is required and a description of what it adds.

Keeping them up to date

These plugins are versioned with the theme rather than through the WordPress plugin directory, so they update when Salient does. After a theme update the notice may reappear asking you to update a plugin to a newer minimum version. Run through the same screen and use Bulk actions > Update.

See Updating Salient for the theme side of this.

If a plugin will not install

• “Are you sure you want to do this?” or a blank screen. Almost always a PHP limit. Unpacking a plugin needs memory_limit at 256M or more and enough max_execution_time to finish. See Server Requirements for the full list, and ask your host to raise them if you cannot.
• The page builder will not activate. Only one copy of WPBakery Page Builder can run at a time. If you installed WPBakery separately, deactivate and delete that copy first, then activate Salient's.
• A plugin folder already exists. WordPress refuses to overwrite an existing folder. Deactivate and delete the old copy from Plugins > Installed Plugins, then install again from this screen.
• File permission errors. WordPress needs write access to wp-content/plugins. Your host can correct the ownership on that directory.