When developing a WordPress theme, it’s helpful to have a large amount of content (posts, pages, comments, etc.) in your testing blog. Not only does it provide you with content to style, but it also gives you an idea of a what a real blog would look like sporting your theme. There are many ways to populate your blog, and today we’ll look into a few of them.
Write it Yourself
This has the honor of being my least favorite method. Not only is it time-consuming, but it’s also exceptionally boring – and creating WordPress themes is all about having fun, right?
Import a WordPress .XML Testing Data File
There more than a few WordPress .XML testing data files available for free on the web. If you are going to try to have your theme accepted into the official WordPress themes directory, it’s a good idea to use the one created by Automattic, because that’s what the WordPress.org people will be using to preview your theme. If you don’t like the one by Automattic, a Google search will give you a lot of other options.
If you are unfamiliar with importing content, the WordPress codex has a great tutorial to get you started.
This plugin will automatically generate the testing content for you, and then, with the click of a button, allow you to delete it all. It gives you options as to how much you wish to generate, the post dates of the posts and pages, and also lets you add custom fields in bulk. I really like this plugin, although it does have it’s drawbacks – one of which being that it doesn’t generate comments, which are very important in theme development.
So to Sum it All Up…
There is not really a right or wrong way to do it, it just depends on you specific need. If you have a very customized blog, writing your own may very well be the way to go, while if you are designing a blog that won’t make use of comments, the WP Dummy Content Plugin will probably work just great.
I hope that you have gotten a better idea of the options available, and that this information will be helpful in your future WordPress pursuits.