Today, I’m happy to announce that the Release Candidate 1 of the Merlin WP is out. We at ProteusThemes have a strong need for such onboarding experience and we’ll be using it in production, so we have a clear need and motivation to make it happen. I don’t blame Rich, he’s been playing solo most of the time and even though there was an excitement in the community, nobody really stepped-in and help him push the project forward. However, that didn’t happen and there was little activity in the repo since August. In his announcement post, Rich mentioned that he’s been aiming at releasing a stable version of Merlin by the end of August.
![new merlin project m url 2-23-2018 new merlin project m url 2-23-2018](https://tidbits.com/uploads/2019/11/merlin_project-6-ipad-scene-640x480.jpeg)
However, once checking the codebase I’ve noticed that it’s using the modified version of the original WordPress importer which has a bad reputation for having issues on many shared hostings. Merlin kicks in at this point – it was designed specifically to make the initial actions that everyone makes after installing and activating the theme as easy and enjoyable as possible. It was designed to be the best WordPress content importer out there which solves most of the issues the official WP XML importer has, but it doesn’t make the very first steps after activating the theme any easier for the user. In the blog post he mentions our One Click Demo Import (OCDI) plugin which we’ve released less than 2 years ago and with 200,000+ active installations today it’s the most popular content demo importer for WordPress! But the plugin as such leaves a lot of room for improvements. In our team, we had other projects lined up and we didn’t want to distract our focus away.
![new merlin project m url 2-23-2018 new merlin project m url 2-23-2018](https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Yw4y3X6UyP0/Wo_qzyH10LI/AAAAAAAADCA/k1LhptlJkBsLb799KykdsJmmp6PHRIFywCLcBGAs/s1600/27503840_1999566800310481_1452174313443354482_o%2B%281%29.jpg)
However, back then Rich suggested that that project is in beta and it should not be used in the production environment. And I know many other people were too, for a good reason – he hit the bullseye of many users and theme developers’ pain point. When he published the blog post where he revealed the Merlin project, I was blown away. I met Rich for the first time at Pressnomics 5 and we kept in touch since. It makes installing a new WordPress theme, its recommended WordPress plugins, Customizer settings, widgets, and demo content, an exciting and gratifying user experience. Merlin WP is my stab at addressing the tedious and exhausting WordPress theme setup and onboarding process. In the summer heat of the last year, Rich Tabor has spiced up the atmosphere with his project Merlin WP – the onboarding wizard for themes or, as he puts it: