Blogging, Code, Plugins, Strategy, Web Tools, Wordpress
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WordPress Dummy Data – Test That Theme!

Posted by John Saddington on Dec 30, 2008

One thing that I’m going to spend a little bit more time doing is unloading all my blogging hacks onto you guys.  Essentially I’ll be giving you my most guarded secrets in how I “do” blogging, especially in terms of WordPress design, plugins, theming, etc…

So, one of the first tips is also one of the best.

Whenever you’re starting a new blog or want to stress-test a theme, you’re going to want to make sure it can handle everything that you may throw at it, especially from a content and blog post perspective.  Can your new theme “handle” quotes?  Bolding? Bullets? Does it align pictures correctly?

Theming your WordPress blog is fun, but can be dangerous if you don’t “check” it before use… especially if you don’t know how to code or fix the errors down the road.

So, one of the things that I do is upload bogus and dummy XML page and blog post content to my new blog and/or themes…  This dummy data contains everything that a theme might express in a blog post, with a bunch of tags, categories, child-cats, child-pages, comments, gravatar-support, etc…

Upload this baby into your blog and see if your theme works out just fine.  Make sure you follow these picture instructions… don’t forget that “check box” either!

churchcrunch_dummy_data_1

churchcrunch_dummy_data_2

churchcrunch_dummy_data_3

If your theme survives, you may just have a winner…!

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John Saddington

John is the Chief Editor @ The 8BIT Network and Senior Blog Junkie here at ChurchCrunch.He enjoys Triple-Tall Americanos, developing Wordpress Themes, and a few other Random Things.

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13 Responses to “WordPress Dummy Data – Test That Theme!”

  1. djbyron
    Tuesday, December 30, 2008 at 8:07 am

    Very cool…
    Bookmarked this page for future reference. (My next theme update will be a custom one so that will definitely need testing)

    Reply
    • human3rror
      Wednesday, December 31, 2008 at 4:23 am

      :) this one's a good one. i love it.

      Reply
  2. Ben Tortora
    Saturday, May 30, 2009 at 7:25 am

    Thanks this is the perfect data file I was looking for. Shared with my twitter followers.

    Reply
    • human3rror
      Saturday, May 30, 2009 at 11:31 am

      Sweet! Pass it around!

      —Sorry for the brevity and rampant spelling errors… This was obviously \”Sent from my iPhone\”.

      Reply
  3. andydarnell
    Saturday, May 30, 2009 at 11:44 am

    Wow this looks like a promising series of posts.

    Reply
    • human3rror
      Saturday, May 30, 2009 at 11:56 am

      oh, this one's an old one.

      Reply
  4. Josh Wagner
    Saturday, May 30, 2009 at 12:35 pm

    Again, brilliant. This will be great, I need a theme tester. Thanks.

    Reply

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  4. churchcrunch (churchcrunch)

    New blog post: WordPress Dummy Data – Test That Theme! http://tinyurl.com/88muza

  5. human3rror (human3rror)

    WordPress Dummy Data::: Test that Theme!!!! —> http://tinyurl.com/88muza