Merlin WP, the WordPress theme setup wizard that I started working on a number of months ago, has finally neared its first stable release (GitHub). Click here to view the release notes, detailed by Primož Cigler.

While I originally announced the project in August of last year, progress slowed down quite a bit while life picked up. You see, I ran into a snag regarding the wizard’s content importing. While the importing process worked “ok” most of the time, it was subpar to the experience I was shooting for. That’s where Primož Cigler, co-founder of ProteusThemes, and his phenomenal team come into play. If you’re not already familiar with ProteusThemes, they’re the folks who build the infamous demo importer cleverly named, One Click Demo Import. OCDI has amassed well over 200k active installations and is most definitely the best solution for importing a WordPress theme’s demo content.

Now you see, things are getting pretty interesting.

Primož reached out in early February and offered his team to essentially add OCDI’s trusted functionality within the first-class user experience that Merlin WP offers. Together, we’ve put together the first release candidate of Merlin WP, which is available today on GitHub. Apart from the major back-end rebuild, we’ve also added support for the Redux framework importer, sponsored by Chris Robinson.

A New Beginning

When I first announced Merlin WP, I mentioned how superior OCDI was at importing content, but left the user’s experience on the table. That’s the whole reason I started developing Merlin WP in the first place: to improve the first-touch user-experience within WordPress themes. With the contributions from ProteusThemes, Merlin WP is well on it’s way to doing just that.