Easier Theme Development with Sample WordPress Content
Developing a theme for public release isn’t an easy task. When you’re the only one using your theme you don’t have to worry about expanding it, but put it into the hands of other users and it better be ready for any content they throw at it. Blockquotes, lists, and floating images - there are plenty of elements that are common to blogs that need to be supported in every theme you release. Cue our new sample WordPress content.
Download our Sample WordPress Content
We put together a collection of posts, tags, categories, and pages into an XML file - perfect for importing right into a new installation of WordPress. Here are some of the things this collection includes:
- Multiple posts with different elements in each
- 12 Posts to force pagination
- Blockquotes, lists - ordered and unordered - and floating images
- Comments on a few of the posts
- Parent, child, and grandchild categories and pages
- Tags
- Multiple months for the archives
Using this file is easy. Simply download the zip file and extract it. Then, log in to your WordPress admin panel and navigate to Manage>Import. Select the WordPress option from the bottom of the list, choose your file, and upload it. Within a few minutes you should have a ready-to-go development server.
Since this is the first release of this XML file, there are probably a few things we might have missed. If you think anything should be added to the collection, let us know in the comments and we’ll update it later.
72 Responses to “Easier Theme Development with Sample WordPress Content”
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Keiron
Posted on September 12th, 2008 at 7:54 am
Fantastic Idea!!
Andrea_R
Posted on September 12th, 2008 at 9:08 am
Awesome! Thanks for doing this! I’ve been too lazy to whip up my own…
Nyssa
Posted on September 12th, 2008 at 9:45 am
Perfect. Just what I need right now as I’m working on a theme and I am generally pretty lazy when it comes to sample posts for myself.
m-alo
Posted on September 12th, 2008 at 9:46 am
Nice idea! It could save theme developers a lot of time when setting up a demo-site.
I think an improvement could be:
more than 10 posts (so the link to older posts shows at the bottom by default on an out-of-the-box installation).
adelle
Posted on September 12th, 2008 at 9:51 am
Dan great idea! This is very helpful, thanks for this!
James Paden
Posted on September 12th, 2008 at 9:54 am
Wow, I really need this last weekend when I redesigned my blog (comments welcome!). Thanks!
Simon North
Posted on September 12th, 2008 at 10:05 am
Nice, ive been looking for something like this for ages
Bill Biwer
Posted on September 12th, 2008 at 11:09 am
This is great. Good thinking.
Vladimir Lysak
Posted on September 12th, 2008 at 11:31 am
Great idea! I use it for my site. But I translate it to Russian. Dan Philibin, what you think about this idea?
kevin
Posted on September 12th, 2008 at 12:16 pm
Thanks! This saves lots of time.
Dan Philibin
Posted on September 12th, 2008 at 12:43 pm
@Vladmir I don’t really see a point in translating it since most of the text is just lorem ipsum. Go ahead if you want, but there isn’t really much to translate.
Toru
Posted on September 12th, 2008 at 2:02 pm
Its great idea. I have been thinking of making something similar, but never thought about using the WP’s built in export/inport function…
I will be quite intersted to add few posts in Japanese into this file. Don’t know about in Russian, but in multi-byte language like Japanese, it is bit different.
Dan Philibin
Posted on September 12th, 2008 at 2:04 pm
If anyone finds the need to add language-specific posts to this collection go ahead and do so, but please link back to here and let me know so I can add a link to this post. Just don’t try and translate the lorem ipsum.
Randa Clay
Posted on September 12th, 2008 at 4:38 pm
Thank you very much! I’ve been planning to put something like this together myself and have just not had the time, so I appreciate it.
Cobus Bester
Posted on September 12th, 2008 at 5:12 pm
Thanks guys! I’m reinstalling my local WP as I type this. Will definitely be uploading this collection of content. Thanks again!
Michael Martine, Remarkablogger
Posted on September 12th, 2008 at 7:56 pm
This is a fantastic idea whose time has come. Excellent! Such a no-brainer, and yet nobody had thought of it before.
Brian Richards
Posted on September 12th, 2008 at 9:59 pm
Man, I was working on the exact same thing on my local dev server… then I wiped it accidentally when I was building a client site. I’m so glad you guys did this, saves me a good few hours of getting things the way I want. Yet another reason you’re so fan-freaking-tastic!
Blessings!
-Brian Richards
Ryan
Posted on September 13th, 2008 at 12:11 am
Excellent! Thanks for creating this.
I made something similar a while back after I spent a few hours scouring the net trying to find a suitably large database/XML file to upload, but I never found anything.
Mike Smith
Posted on September 13th, 2008 at 12:34 am
AWESOME! Downloaded it and will be using it a LOT since I set up all of my clients themes on test installs of their own. This will save a LOT of time
Thanks
Mike
Dainis Graveris
Posted on September 13th, 2008 at 1:31 am
Wow, original idea! I will download and test it for my needs too! Sounds like great time saver for me! Really appreciated!
Stu Greenham
Posted on September 13th, 2008 at 7:38 am
I posted this on the 8th of September, exactly the same idea, XML download file
http://selfconclusion.co.uk/2008/09/wordpress-xml-import-download/
kucrut
Posted on September 13th, 2008 at 10:22 am
great idea. thanks!
liam
Posted on September 13th, 2008 at 12:42 pm
Clever stuff, nice one!
Ryan
Posted on September 15th, 2008 at 12:27 pm
I’m just in the process of setting up a Wordpress demo sites to test themes on…this couldn’t come at a better time! This will be super handy, so thanks for offering it!
Doug
Posted on September 15th, 2008 at 2:05 pm
Okay, great timing!
John
Posted on September 15th, 2008 at 4:34 pm
Brilliant, but with one major flaw - no comments???
Thankyou for putting this together though! Very very useful
Mig Pilot
Posted on September 15th, 2008 at 6:55 pm
Fantastic stuff. We are about to start work on a big WP based site for a client, so this could not have come at a better time. Great thinking, a really useful idea. Thanks for doing and offering it.
mGz
Posted on September 16th, 2008 at 5:53 am
You save for me about an hour on each WP project. I luv Ya!
kthxbye
Th3ProphetMan
Posted on September 17th, 2008 at 11:00 am
Nice work, i think you only need to add some comments to one of the post, from post author, blog author etc and normal non author comments
Thanks for this
Mike Smith
Posted on September 17th, 2008 at 12:52 pm
Anyone else have a problem with it timing out on them when trying to import them in?
Tom Sinclair
Posted on September 17th, 2008 at 1:01 pm
Great time saver, just what I was after!
Elliot Jay Stocks
Posted on September 17th, 2008 at 2:07 pm
Hats off, guys! Thanks for such a great resource!
Dan Philibin
Posted on September 17th, 2008 at 4:34 pm
Look for an update to this tomorrow with comments, more posts, and a better name for the file
\Маша
Posted on September 24th, 2008 at 11:24 am
Супер статья! Подписался на RSS, буду следить =)
Devin Reams
Posted on September 27th, 2008 at 1:51 pm
Nice work on this, Dan. It’s very helpful. We at Crowd Favorite actually like it so much we tested our new WordPress theme with it. Kudos!
Matt
Posted on September 27th, 2008 at 5:46 pm
You’re embedding the “fake” WordPress logo in the sample content, the one with the squished W. There are a million versions of the properly proportioned logo here:
http://wordpress.org/about/logos/
Dan Philibin
Posted on September 27th, 2008 at 10:36 pm
@Matt I made that a LONG time ago for a tutorial for making flare artwork with that logo (by now it’s been used everywhere and then some), and just pulled it out of my images folder when I did this. I’ll put the “real deal” logo in the next update - thanks for pointing that out.
John
Posted on September 28th, 2008 at 10:37 pm
Great job guys! This was exactly what I needed.
Dave
Posted on October 9th, 2008 at 1:07 am
This has made setting up a test environment so much quicker and easier. Thanks A lot.
Sarah Lewis
Posted on October 17th, 2008 at 9:49 am
Thanks for making this available! I found it very helpful for testing my newest theme.
A few things that might be nice additions:
- Images with captions (a la WP 2.6)
- Posts with comments/trackbacks in various states of openness, including a post with existing comments but where the comments have since been closed (many themes don’t display comments at all in that case)
Thanks again for the great work!
Antonio Wells
Posted on October 21st, 2008 at 8:06 pm
This is a great find! It’s very tedious filling in fictitious posts to show off a theme. Thanks!
nicole@younic
Posted on October 22nd, 2008 at 8:48 am
Thank you so much for sharing this! I’ve been looking for something like that for months! Thanks!
Dicky
Posted on October 28th, 2008 at 5:59 am
Thanks. It really helps theme developers.
broarbula
Posted on November 2nd, 2008 at 4:36 am
Привет !!!
как вам вчерашний драматический матч между ЦСКА и Спартаком ? 
Очумелый Футбол !!!
broarbula
Posted on November 8th, 2008 at 3:19 pm
пока я жив, я буду помнить ваш ресурс
заношу в букмарки….
broarbula
Posted on November 9th, 2008 at 6:28 am
Так зачитался, что пропустил бы футбол
AzizLight
Posted on November 10th, 2008 at 11:28 am
Thanks for this. It worked on my old wordpress local install (I had an old version of wordpress, one of the first 1.6 versions) but then I formated my mac, reinstalled wordpress locally (the newest version, 2.6.3 I think) and tried to import the xml file and it did not work. When I click on the Wordpress link in the Import section it asks to browse for a “WordPress eXtended RSS (WXR) file”…
If I upload the xml file I get this error:
Sorry, there has been an error.
Failed to write file to disk.
e-sushi
Posted on November 14th, 2008 at 12:35 pm
Thank´s… just jumping into wordpress (and wordpress-theming at the same time), this is just what I need.
2 Thumbs up!