WordPress MU plugin: Demo Data Creator

If you’re a web geek like me and into developing WordPress MU websites (like wibsite.com), it’s useful to have a bit of demo data in your system while it’s being built. This allows you to check that lists of things are displaying as they should, and that themes are working when they get data in them.

Historically it’s been a pain to add that data in. Either you need to take a backup of another site and use that data, or you need to tediously create multiple users and blogs yourself. No more, not now my Demo Data Creator is in town!

This WordPress MU plugin gives you a new admin screen where you can enter some parameters, click a button and (after a short wait) random demo data will be created. The parameter options include:

  • The number of users
  • Whether you want just user, or users and blogs
  • Maximum number of blogs per user
  • Maximum number of categories per blog
  • Maximum number of posts per blog
  • Maximum number of blog post paragraphs
  • Maximum number of pages per blog
  • Whether you want nested pages
  • Maximum number of comments per post
  • Maximum number of links in blogroll

For BuddyPress you also have:

  • Number of groups
  • Number of members per group
  • Number of wire posts for each group
  • Number of friends per user
  • Number of statuses for each user
  • Number of wire posts for each user

Post content and comment text is automatically generated from Lorem ipsum text, for post content it’s even HTML-formatted.

You can also create groups, group members and user friendships if your WordPress MU site has BuddyPress installed.

Installation

Just drop it in your /wp-content/mu-plugins/ folder, no activation required.

The plugin is available for download from my page in the official WordPress plugin repository.

History

0.6 Fixed bug which stopped demo blog tables being created

0.5 Fixed bugs with user wire posts, added support for group wire posts, cleaned up code

0.4 Prepared code for proper translation support, fixed bug with BuddyPress XProfile data, added support for BuddyPress status messages

0.3 Cleaned up code

0.2 Added categories, pages for normal WordPress MU sites. Added BuddyPress groups, group members and user friends BuddyPress-enabled sites.

0.1: June 7, 2009: Initial release added to the official WordPress plugin repository

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