wm.sampledata 0.4

Why use this?

Standardized sampledata makes it soo much easier to work on a project (especially when working in teams).

This package eases the generation of sampledata for your plone project.

How to use it

For developers working on a project there’s a view listing and running all available sampledata plugins:

http://localhost/plone/@@sampledata

By default the view does not list any plugins. The screen above shows the example plugin activated via <include package="wm.sampledata.example" />.

Writing and registering your custom sampledata plugin is very easy:

    from wm.sampledata import utils

class MyPlugin(object):
    implements(ISampleDataPlugin)

    title = u"My Plugin Content"
    description = u"Creates a portlet and a random image"

    def generate(self, context):
        portlet = StaticAssignment(u"Sample Portlet", "<p>some content</p>")
        utils.addPortlet(context, 'plone.leftcolumn', portlet)

        utils.createImage(context, 'random-nature.jpg',
                    file = utils.getRandomImage(category='nature', gray=False),
                    title=u"Random Image",
                    description=u"Downloaded from lorempixel.com")


myPlugin = MyPlugin()
component.provideUtility(myPlugin,
                         ISampleDataPlugin
                         'my.plugin')

See wm.sampledata.example for a complete example of a custom plugin.

You can also group plugins (and even other plugin-gropus) so users need to run only one plugin to setup their sampledata correctly:

from wm.sampledata import PluginGroup

class TestPortal(PluginGroup):

    PLUGINS = [
       MyPlugin,  # also 'my.plugin' could be used
       MainMenu,
       AnotherPluginGroup,
    ]

title = u"Complete Test Portal"
description = u"Creates Main Menu items, Sampledata Folder and Portlets"

Note that you can use the utility names as well in PLUGINS but using classes directly is more straight forward in most cases.

There is a growing set of utility methods in wm.sampledata.utils (eg for handling portlets and files, or download images from http://lorempixel.com) which you can use in your plugins.

Installation

Simply add wm.sampledata to your buildout’s instance eggs - a zcml slug is not needed in plone versions that ship with z3c.autoinclude (Plone>=3.3):

[buildout]
...
eggs =
    ...
    wm.sampledata

Why yet another package?

There are several other packages for generating test/sampledata but none of them fitted my usecase. (Which is providing a user interface for pluggable sampledata generators so developers/skinners can use standardized data when developing on a project)

A while ago i asked what other people do on plone.users

z3c.sampledata

Would do the same and much more (dependencies, groups, configuration ui for each plugin)

for me it was too complex to get it running on my zope2 instance and it seems to be tailored for zope3 anyway.

Basically it would be great to make wm.sampledata use z3c.sampledata and provide plone specific plugins for it.

zopyx.ipsumplone

Seems to provide very similar utility methods. No pluggable Generators, No User-Interface

ely.contentgenerator

provides a xml syntax to create samplecontent, might be useful to use in custom plugins

collective.contentgenerator

looks like this is meant for creating (random) sampledata for stresstests

collective.lorem

content action to fill content with lorem-ipsum text and provides utility methods createStandardContent to create random content (news, documents, files, image) and createNestedStructure to create arbitrary nested folder structures.

collective.loremipsum

Allows to create members (names taken from fakenamegenerator.com)

zettwerk.setup

contains utility methods for setuphandlers. the one in structure.py offers a method to create content out of a list of dictionaries.

TODO

Include Ipsum Ipsum text obtained via the api from http://www.randomtext.me/

(for other interesting/funny generators see http://designshack.net/articles/inspiration/30-useful-and-hilarious-lorem-ipsum-generators/)

use plone.api in utility methods or replace them with plone.api where appropriate

eventually provide api to use fakenamegenerator.com for names (collective.loremipsum already uses that)

Contribute

If you have any ideas for improvement or know another alternative to this package please File a ticket or drop me a mail

Changelog