This is a side-step to my series of notes on How to preserve a WordPress site using the WP REST API
To have actual (but faked) content I can share in examples, and also allow anyone to run the API queries against for testing and examining the result, I set up a sample site at lab.webit.nu.
What I wasn’t prepared for was that it’s hard to find useful test content to fill the site with (the official “Theme Unit Test” was more or less of no use for my purpose). I finally found two candidates and decided on the second one which I describe below.
wp-cli-fixtures seems really flexible, but refused to run because of conflicts in the code. I managed to “fix” these conflicts, but I still couldn’t have it connect images to the posts. I also tested Faker which ‘wp-cli-fixtures’ is based on, but it hasn’t been updated for many years, and failed because the use of the flickr API has changed.
test-content-generator acts both as a plugin and as an extension to wp-cli. It has options to generate taxonomies (categories and tags, but not to specify which one separately), users (specify user role or randomize), add images (from picsum.photos) in a specified size, create posts and comments to them, and (from the WP backend) create pages.
Creating fake content for the test site
As mentioned (and true for all three alternatives for creating fake content) wp-cli is required since the data-creators are extensions to it.
Simple enough to install according to the instructions on the wp-cli homepage:
## download and test curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/wp-cli/builds/gh-pages/phar/wp-cli.phar php wp-cli.phar --info ## then if it works chmod +x wp-cli.phar sudo mv wp-cli.phar /usr/local/bin/wp
Install the ‘test-content-generator’ plugin as described:
wp plugin install test-content-generator --activate
To have the data itself created in the right order (and to not have to type it over again if I wipe the database), I created a script to do it:
#!/bin/sh wp test users --amount=5 --role_keys=editor,author wp test users --amount=15 --role_keys=subscriber wp test users --amount=3 --role_keys=contributor wp test users --amount=10 wp test taxonomies --amount=50 wp test images --amount=20 --image_width=1500 --image_height=410 wp test images --amount=20 --image_width=1500 --image_height=410 wp test images --amount=20 --image_width=1500 --image_height=410 wp test posts --amount=60 wp test comments --amount=100 wp test comments --amount=33
I wanted more comments than the maximum of 100 for each command run, so this is the reason for two of this command. The limit for images is 20, so I ran this three times to create enough different images for each post. The four ‘wp test users’ commands in the beginning is to create a set amount of one kind of users, then add 10 more users with randomized roles.
I also uploaded 10 images from stocksnap.io the normal way through wp-admin to have more images to examine the database content for. Five of these will be attached to each of the test pages I create using ‘test-content-generator’ from within wp-admin.
My next post will be the continuation of the series on how to preserve that WordPress site…