How to publish free template?

Expected behavior I'm trying to publish the template found here https://mdbootstrap.com/freebies/jquery/portfolio/

I don't see anything in the documentation that specifically addresses how to publish the templates.

Actual behavior

so far, I've downloaded the zip folder and extracted it to my desktop. After that, I have opened up the project in Visual Studio. I've tried doing mdb init but it creates a whole new project nested inside of the template. I've also tried doing a mdb publish, but then it wants me to create a package.json file. So, I select the yes option that it gives me to create one. I go through the prompts and assign the package a name of bensportfolio when it asks me what I want to name the package. After that it tries to publish the file, but fails with 'Missing package.json file.' So I run the mdb publish command again and get this error message

Problem with reading project metadata:
Error: ENOENT: no such file or directory, open '/home/benjamin/Desktop/Portfolio-                                Template-Bootstrap-master/.mdb'
TypeError: Cannot read property 'packageName' of undefined
 at PublishHandler._callee$ (/usr/lib/node_modules/mdb-cli/utils/publish-handler.js:100:52)
at tryCatch (/usr/lib/node_modules/mdb-cli/node_modules/regenerator-runtime/runtime.js:65:40)
at Generator.invoke [as _invoke] (/usr/lib/node_modules/mdb-cli/node_modules/regenerator-runtime/runtime.js:303:22)
at Generator.prototype.(anonymous function) [as next] (/usr/lib/node_modules/mdb-cli/node_modules/regenerator-runtime/runtime.js:117:21)
at asyncGeneratorStep (/usr/lib/node_modules/mdb-cli/utils/publish-handler.js:11:103)
at _next (/usr/lib/node_modules/mdb-cli/utils/publish-handler.js:13:194)

Resources (screenshots, code snippets etc.)