Realistic Dummy Content

Generate realistic demo content with
Devel's devel_generate module.

Usage

Enable this module and Devel's
devel_generate. You will now see portraits used for profile pictures, and
stock photos instead of the color blocks generated by devel_generate. All
images included in this module are freely licensed (see the README.md files in
the directories containing the images).

Extending this module

This project contains two modules:

• Realistic Dummy Content API (realistic_dummy_content_api), which looks
  inside every enabled module for a specific directory structure
  (path/to/module/realistic_dummy_content) and replaces dummy content
  accordingly.

• Realistic Dummy Content (realistic_dummy_content), which replaces user
  pictures and node article images with portraits and stock photography. You
  can reproduce the realistic_dummy_content/realistic_dummy_content
  directory structure in your own modules as
  my_custom_module/realistic_dummy_content for better control of the
  realistic dummy content you want to generate. If you don't want the example
  stock images that ship with this module, you can disable Realistic Dummy
  Content (realistic_dummy_content) and leave Realistic Dummy Content API
  (realistic_dummy_content_api) enabled.

Developers can also extend Realistic Dummy Content by implementing hooks
defined in ./api/realistic_dummy_content_api.api.php. Specifically, if you
want to be able to define realistic dummy content for a custom field type and
the standard technique is not working, you can submit an issue to the issue
queue, or a
pull request for this
module.

Which version to use

Use the 7.x-1.0-beta7 version only if you are using PHP 5.3 or earlier. All other users should use x.x-2.x versions.

Creating recipes

Often, sites require a set number of entities to be created in a specific
sequence. For example, if your site defines schools which have entity
references to school boards, a
realistic scenario may be to generate 3 school boards followed by 20 schools.
You can define this type of recipe based on the example at
./realistic_dummy_content/recipe.

Once your recipe is written, you can run it (create the content) using Drush:

drush generate-realistic

See ./realistic_dummy_content/recipe/README.md for more details.

Field meta data

Some fields have special meta data: body fields can have input formats in addition to body text; image fields can have alt text in addition to the image. This can be achieved using a specific naming scheme, and you will find an example in the enclosed data, which looks like:

realistic_dummy_content/fields/node/article/
  - body/
    - ipsum.txt
    - ipsum.txt.format.txt
    - lorem.txt
 - field_image/
    - 1.jpg
    - 2.jpg
    - 2.jpg.alt.txt

In the above example, realistic_dummy_content sees two possible body values,
one of which with a specific input format; and two possible images, one of
which with a specific alt text. Meta data is never compulsory, and in the case
where a meta attribute is needed, a reasonable fallback value is used, for
example filtered_html (Drupal 7) or basic_html (Drupal 8) will be used if no
format is specified for the body.

Issue queue and pull requests

See the issue queue if you have questions, bug reports or feature requests.

Pull requests can be filed against the GitHub repo.

Drupal 7 and Drupal 8 in one "universal" codebase

The 7.x-2.x and 8.x-2.x codebases are identical and both work on Drupal 7 or Drupal 8 sites. This is discussed inthe blog post "Can the exact same module code run on Drupal 7 and 8?", Dcycle Blog, Feb. 28, 2017.

Docker integration (2.x branch only)

To test this module you can run:

cd ./development &&; ./test.sh

To create a development environment for Drupal 7, make sure you have Docker installed (for example on a CoreOS vagrant machine on Mac OS), then you can run:

cd ./development && ./build-dev-environment.sh

This will install two development environments, one for Drupal 7 and one for Drupal 8. When you change any code, it will reflected in both your environments in real time.

Continuous integration and automated tests

Automated tests are run using
CircleCI,
Docker, Drupal's Simpletest (which
is being phased out because it's slow), and PHPUnit.
Linting is being run for PHP and shell files.

Automated testing status on Circle CI

• 7.x-2.x branch
• 8.x-2.x branch

Sponsors

• Dcycle (Current)
• The Linux Foundation (previous)
• CGI (Initial development)