Owldraft Starter Sites

Owldraft Starter Sites imports a theme demo into your site: its posts, pages, photos, menus, footer widgets, Customizer settings and fonts. Pick a demo under Appearance → Starter Sites, click Import, and your site looks like the demo a minute later. Then replace the sample content with your own.

Undo without losing work

Everything the import adds is tagged, so Remove demo content knows exactly what came from the demo. It deletes only demo content you haven’t touched:

• Demo posts and pages you edited (or that received comments) stay, and become your own.
• Photos you still use, in any post, widget or as your logo, stay.
• Categories and tags still used by your posts stay, and so do menus you changed.
• Your own posts and pages are never touched.

Removal can also put back the menus, widgets, site title and Customizer settings you had before the import. If you changed those after importing, this option starts off, so your changes aren’t undone by accident.

What it does

• One click, in small steps. Photos download a few at a time and every step is a short request, so the import works on shared hosting without hitting time limits.
• Shows what changes before it changes it. The import dialog tells you if your site already has content, which settings the demo replaces, and which plugins (if any) it installs. Recommended plugins come ticked, and you can untick them.
• Tidies the default content. If WordPress’s “Hello world!” post and “Sample Page” are untouched, the import can move them to the Trash. Removing the demo brings them back.
• Optional demo bylines. Demo authors can be added as users without an email address or a usable password, or every post can be credited to you.
• Fonts included. A demo’s fonts are added to your site’s Font Library, the same way fonts installed in the editor are, so nothing loads from Google.
• No account, no tracking, no upsell. It downloads the demo you pick and nothing else.

Supported themes

• Stoat: a blog theme, with demos for a food blog, travel blog, lifestyle blog, fashion blog, parenting blog and more. See the Stoat demos.
• Evermag: a news and magazine theme, with demos for local news, tech, sports, business, entertainment and more. See the Evermag demos.
• Rural Blog: a simple theme for personal blogs, with demos for an essayist, a photographer, an illustrator, a developer and more. See the Rural Blog demos.

More Owldraft themes will follow. If your active theme has no demos, the Starter Sites screen lists the themes that do and changes nothing on your site.

For developers

The same importer is available in WP-CLI:

• wp owldraft-starter-sites list
• wp owldraft-starter-sites import stoat/main [--no-site-title] [--no-authors] [--no-defaults] [--no-recommended]
• wp owldraft-starter-sites remove [--keep-settings]
• wp owldraft-starter-sites export <theme>/<demo> --dir=<folder> turns a site into a demo package.

External services

This plugin downloads demo files from starter.owldraft.com, a file server run by Owldraft (hosted on Cloudflare R2). It needs this to show and import demos; nothing else depends on it.

What is downloaded, and when:

• When you open Appearance → Starter Sites: your server downloads the list of demos (index.json, cached for 12 hours), and your browser shows each demo’s preview image from the same server.
• When you click Import: that demo’s content file (demo.json), its photos and its font files.

These are plain file downloads. Like every request WordPress makes, they include your server’s IP address and a user agent with the WordPress version and your site’s address. The plugin sends no other data, and makes no requests while you’re not on the Starter Sites screen or importing.

• Owldraft terms of service: https://owldraft.com/terms/
• Owldraft privacy policy: https://owldraft.com/privacy-policy/

If a demo needs or recommends a plugin, that plugin is installed from WordPress.org (through WordPress’s own plugin installer), only after you confirm the import, and a recommended plugin only if you leave it ticked.