When starting a new project for a client or ourselves we always face the “white page” or “blank screen” terror:
- where to start from, how to create new pages and posts in order to be able to see how a given theme behaves?
Clients rarely have their content ready when starting a new project and they always want to see how the site will look like when finished before preparing final texts and images for their sites. They will ask for mockups and examples of layouts.
Many themes offer a so called “one click demo content” import but you have no control on what will be added to your fresh new site and often images are not included or you simply get blank placeholders for them.
The best approach is to use a demo content importer plugin and your best choice will be the Posts Generator free plugin.
Posts Generator offers 4 distinct sections for generating content that you can use independently:
- Posts, Custom Post Types and Pages (including images)
- Terms (categories and tags)
- Users
- Comments
The most important section is the Posts section that works with any post types active at your site, like pages or custom post types. In this section, you can precisely define:
- the amount or range of posts generated (or have a random range)
- a given user for all those posts
- post status (draft, published, private or pending review)
- comment status (allow comments or comments closed)
- post types
- post dates
- length of post titles
- amount of paragraphs and sorts of inline and block tags
- type of images (featured and/or inline)
- image sources, amount and dimensions
- social embeds
- optional existing taxonomies
The Users section allows you to create any amount of new users with given roles and capabilities as well as biographies of variable length.
The Terms section will create new taxonomies, like categories and tags, for your posts, while the Comments section will create any given amount of comments for your posts or pages with any amount of paragraphs and tags.
When carefully selecting each and every option for any of those sections, you’ll be able to populate your new site extremely fast with the exact amount of demo content you wish to have and placed at the right place.