DemoPress is a brand new and free plugin available from the WordPress.org repository. DemoPress can generate demo or dummy data for WordPress website with support for the bbPress forums, and more third-party plugins in the future.
There are only a few plugins to generate demo data available for WordPress, and most of them are abandoned or broken, and it is very hard to find reliable solutions to quickly generate the demo content for development purposes or while building a website and waiting for real content to be populated.
My goal with the DemoPress is to have a flexible plugin that can support all the WordPress default data structures, with the ability to randomize a lot of parameters, offer different ways to build data, include images where needed, make the generators and builders expandable and support third party plugins too. Right now, bbPress is supported because I use this plugin daily, and I often need to have a demo bbPress website quickly.
DemoPress currently has 5 generators: Users, Terms, Posts, Comments, and bbPress. And, it has many builders to titles, content, images, user names… For each generator, you have tons of options to have some control over the randomization process and selection of builders. Once the generator is set up and run, it runs in the background, and you can follow the process via AJAX refresh. Most generators take seconds to finish, but the Posts generator can be slower because of the featured images it needs to build or download. Featured images can be downloaded from Pixabay and Pexeles websites.
To see the plugin in action, check out this short overview video.
This plugin is far from finished, and I have a lot more ideas for it. I had to put a stop to these at some point to be able to release the first version, but here are some of the features I plan to work on in the near future:
- Generate metadata for users, posts, terms, comments
- Expand the generated content with images and galleries
- Support for WooCommerce and generate products
The plugin is available in the WordPress.org repository, and it is on GitHub also where you can contribute to the plugin development.
For now, try out the new plugin, and let me know what you think about it, what new features would you like to see in the future.
To see the list of all the changes in this version, please check out the changelog. If you find any issues with the new version, please, report them in the support forums.
