loading order of elpa and init.el

Question

I've pulled the starter-kit from https://github.com/technomancy/emacs-starter-kit, and it was installed in ~/.emacs.d/elpa. Following the instruction of the starter-kit.el, I put my user-specific customization in ~/.emacs.d/$USER.el:

(require 'color-theme-solarized)
(color-theme-solarized-dark)
(require 'auto-complete)
(global-auto-complete-mode)

But when I started emacs, it says

File error: Cannot open load file, color-theme-solarized

I checked the load-path variable and found that the path of color-theme-solarized wasn't in it. So I add this before "require" it:

 (add-to-list 'load-path "~/.emacs.d/elpa/color-theme-solarized-20120301)

However the error still occurs.Then I referred to elpa's wiki and it says that all the packages are initialized after the init.el is loaded. Then I read the starter-kit.el and found that the $USER.el is added to after-init-hook, which means that the error shouldn't occur since the $USER.el is loaded at the end of initializing. I desperately move all my customization to the end of init.el, to my surprise, it just work fine. It seems that the init.el is loaded at last rather than at first. How could I make my customization work except writing it in the init.el? I don't want to make the init.el too long.

ps: I've put (require 'package) and (package-initialize) at the beginning of init.el and it doesn't make a difference.

Answer 1

ELPA adds autoloads for your packages. I don't use themes, but typically you would do something like (eval-after-load "color-theme" (quote (color-theme-solarized))), or, if you want it to run after it has just autoloaded (but not fully loaded), (eval-after-load "color-theme-autoloads" (quote (color-theme-solarized))).