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.
Download our Sample WordPress Content
Post Revisions:
- 23 August, 2010 @ 18:50 [Current Revision] by dan philibin
- 23 August, 2010 @ 13:30 by Ryan Imel
- 23 August, 2010 @ 13:29 by Ryan Imel
- 23 August, 2010 @ 13:28 by Ryan Imel
- 23 August, 2010 @ 13:28 by Ryan Imel
- 23 August, 2010 @ 13:23 by Ryan Imel
- 23 August, 2010 @ 13:23 by Ryan Imel
- 12 September, 2008 @ 7:30 by Ryan Imel
Posted September 12, 2008
Keiron said:
Fantastic Idea!!
on September 12, 2008 at 7:54 am
Andrea_R said:
Awesome! Thanks for doing this! I’ve been too lazy to whip up my own…
on September 12, 2008 at 9:08 am
Nyssa said:
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.
on September 12, 2008 at 9:45 am
m-alo said:
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).
on September 12, 2008 at 9:46 am
adelle said:
Dan great idea! This is very helpful, thanks for this!
on September 12, 2008 at 9:51 am
James Paden said:
Wow, I really need this last weekend when I redesigned my blog (comments welcome!). Thanks!
on September 12, 2008 at 9:54 am
Simon North said:
Nice, ive been looking for something like this for ages
on September 12, 2008 at 10:05 am
Bill Biwer said:
This is great. Good thinking.
on September 12, 2008 at 11:09 am
Vladimir Lysak said:
Great idea! I use it for my site. But I translate it to Russian. Dan Philibin, what you think about this idea?
on September 12, 2008 at 11:31 am
kevin said:
Thanks! This saves lots of time.
on September 12, 2008 at 12:16 pm
Dan Philibin said:
@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.
on September 12, 2008 at 12:43 pm
Toru said:
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.
on September 12, 2008 at 2:02 pm
Dan Philibin said:
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.
on September 12, 2008 at 2:04 pm
Randa Clay said:
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.
on September 12, 2008 at 4:38 pm
Cobus Bester said:
Thanks guys! I’m reinstalling my local WP as I type this. Will definitely be uploading this collection of content. Thanks again!
on September 12, 2008 at 5:12 pm
Michael Martine, Remarkablogger said:
This is a fantastic idea whose time has come. Excellent! Such a no-brainer, and yet nobody had thought of it before.
on September 12, 2008 at 7:56 pm
Brian Richards said:
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
on September 12, 2008 at 9:59 pm
Ryan said:
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.
on September 13, 2008 at 12:11 am
Mike Smith said:
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
on September 13, 2008 at 12:34 am
Dainis Graveris said:
Wow, original idea! I will download and test it for my needs too! Sounds like great time saver for me! Really appreciated!
on September 13, 2008 at 1:31 am
Stu Greenham said:
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/
on September 13, 2008 at 7:38 am
kucrut said:
great idea. thanks!
on September 13, 2008 at 10:22 am
liam said:
Clever stuff, nice one!
on September 13, 2008 at 12:42 pm
Ryan said:
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!
on September 15, 2008 at 12:27 pm
Doug said:
Okay, great timing!
on September 15, 2008 at 2:05 pm
John said:
Brilliant, but with one major flaw – no comments???
Thankyou for putting this together though! Very very useful
on September 15, 2008 at 4:34 pm
Mig Pilot said:
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.
on September 15, 2008 at 6:55 pm
mGz said:
You save for me about an hour on each WP project. I luv Ya!
kthxbye
on September 16, 2008 at 5:53 am
Th3ProphetMan said:
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
on September 17, 2008 at 11:00 am
Mike Smith said:
Anyone else have a problem with it timing out on them when trying to import them in?
on September 17, 2008 at 12:52 pm
Tom Sinclair said:
Great time saver, just what I was after!
on September 17, 2008 at 1:01 pm
Elliot Jay Stocks said:
Hats off, guys! Thanks for such a great resource!
on September 17, 2008 at 2:07 pm
Dan Philibin said:
Look for an update to this tomorrow with comments, more posts, and a better name for the file
on September 17, 2008 at 4:34 pm
\Маша said:
Супер статья! Подписался на RSS, буду следить =)
on September 24, 2008 at 11:24 am
Devin Reams said:
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!
on September 27, 2008 at 1:51 pm
Matt said:
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/
on September 27, 2008 at 5:46 pm
Dan Philibin said:
@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.
on September 27, 2008 at 10:36 pm
John said:
Great job guys! This was exactly what I needed.
on September 28, 2008 at 10:37 pm
Dave said:
This has made setting up a test environment so much quicker and easier. Thanks A lot.
on October 9, 2008 at 1:07 am
Sarah Lewis said:
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!
on October 17, 2008 at 9:49 am
Antonio Wells said:
This is a great find! It’s very tedious filling in fictitious posts to show off a theme. Thanks!
on October 21, 2008 at 8:06 pm
nicole@younic said:
Thank you so much for sharing this! I’ve been looking for something like that for months! Thanks!
on October 22, 2008 at 8:48 am
Dicky said:
Thanks. It really helps theme developers.
on October 28, 2008 at 5:59 am
broarbula said:
Привет !!!
как вам вчерашний драматический матч между ЦСКА и Спартаком ? 
Очумелый Футбол !!!
on November 2, 2008 at 4:36 am
broarbula said:
пока я жив, я буду помнить ваш ресурс
заношу в букмарки….
on November 8, 2008 at 3:19 pm
broarbula said:
Так зачитался, что пропустил бы футбол
on November 9, 2008 at 6:28 am
AzizLight said:
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.
on November 10, 2008 at 11:28 am
e-sushi said:
Thank´s… just jumping into wordpress (and wordpress-theming at the same time), this is just what I need.
2 Thumbs up!
on November 14, 2008 at 12:35 pm
tommy said:
works great! thanks!
on November 30, 2008 at 12:16 am
The Code Studio said:
Fantastic, fantastic!!! We’ll be using this for sure.
on December 10, 2008 at 11:01 am