Test Content Generator

Developing any WP plugin or theme often means needing to test it against as much of a “real site” as your development environment will allow, and if you’re adding that test data by hand, it gets pretty tedious pretty quickly.

This plugin will let you use either WP-CLI commands, or the admin page in Tools->Content Generator to add test users, populate the Media Library with example images, an additional test custom post type and custom taxonomies, generate as many test “Lorem Ipsum” posts as you want, and then add comments to those posts.

Each of those “Lorem Ipsum” posts will be randomly tagged and categorised, and can also be assigned one of the test images as its Featured Image, as well as a variety of HTML content in addition to the usual paragraphs.

This plugin is primarily for people who need to test plugins and themes on a regular basis, but it would let anyone get a feel of how their site will look when it’s full of real content.

Workflow

All the parts of this plugin are optional, and each can be repeated as much as you want, depending on which parts of your site you want to test.

However, no individual step will “backfill” preceeding ones automatically, so if you have an empty site and you want (eg.) your test Posts to appear to have been written by different people, then you need to add the test Users first.

ie.

• Enable Custom (Post Types & Categories & Tags) before adding terms from your Taxonomies,
• Add Users before downloading Images before generating Posts before adding Comments.

WP CLI Integration

Using the plugin defaults, you can populate a test site with just the following commands:

1. wp plugin install test-content-generator --activate\
   Download and activate the plugin.
2. wp test users --amount=20\
   Add 20 random Editor/Author/Contributor/Subscribers users who have registered within the last 60 days.
3. wp test taxonomies --amount=50\
   Add 50 taxonomy terms split between Categories and Post Tags.
4. wp test images --amount=10\
   Add 10 images of size 800×400 uploaded by any Editor/Author.
5. wp test posts --amount=40\
   Add 40 Posts written within the last 60 days by any Editor/Author/Contributor, with a Featured Image and both categorised and tagged.
6. wp test comments --amount=100\
   Add 100 comments to your Posts written within the last 60 days by any of the registered users.

See wp help test for more details.

0.4.2

• Moved the run() callback of register_setting() into the abstract class (DRY)
• Switched use of rand() to wp_rand() to stop the plugin check whining
• Added translator notes for the various placeholders
• Tested against 6.4.3, 6.5 and 6.6.1

0.4.1

• Changed how some string arrays are passed via CLI to be consistent
• Uses gmdate/wp_json_encode instead of date/json_encode

0.4

• Added WP-CLI integration

0.3

• Tested against 6.4 and 6.3.2
• Added ability to fill media library from https://picsum.photos/
• Added featured images, user creation, comment creation
• Added a better settings page
• Initial public release

0.2

• Added the lipsum routines to generate posts and terms

0.1

• Original plugin – add some test posts