Cannot Activate Community Site Feature

This was an issue with a Site migrated to SharePoint 2013 from 2010.  We had exported and then imported a Publishing Site to find we could not activate the Community Site Feature.

The error in ULS was

Feature Activation: Threw an exception, attempting to roll back.  Feature ‘CommunitySite’ (ID: ‘961d6a9c-4388-4cf2-9733-38ee8c89afd4’).  Exception: Microsoft.SharePoint.SPException: The file is not checked out.  You must first check out this document before making changes. —> System.Runtime.InteropServices.COMException: The file is not checked out.  You must first check out this document before making changes…..

Solution: first activate the Community Site Feature in the new Site before importing