In this post, I am going to show you how to test your new wordpress theme easily with two handy plugins made just for that purpose.
If you are a wordpress theme designer, you know you have to do a lot to actually test your new wordpress theme. For example, you have to write articles of variable length, submit comments, write down tags for each of those posts, create new pages and more to see how things look like after you have ample content there on your new wordpress theme. In fact, few days back, I designed a brand new wordpress theme for a site I am planning to go live with and I was lucky enough that I stumbled upon these two great wordpress plugins. Fine, let’s move on to see our first wordpress plugin that makes life a lot easier.
Theme Test Drive
The theme test drive wordpress plugin enables you to test any theme easily as an administrator of the blog. Your visitors will still see your default or already-chosen theme. This will happen completely behind the scenes and your visitors won’t see that you have actually changed the theme. The other good thing is that if a particular theme supports some options, you can test them just as well by enabling them from the admin side.
WP Dummy Content
This is pretty useful plugin to test your new theme instantly. One of the biggest pain of wordpress theme development is that after you have created it, you have to write bunch of post to see how your theme behaves.
With WP Dummy Content, you can create any number of pages, sub-pages and post for your new theme easily just with a single button press. The titles and content are automatically created for you as well. And yes you have have few options as to the length and type of the content:
- One click content creation
- Choose type of content to insert including single paragraph, multi paragraphs, styled lists and random content.
- Delete all content with one click.
I hope this post turns out to be useful for the wordpress theme designers. And finally, do let us know if you know of some other similar plugins through your comments or feed back.
Update
Here are some of the more plugins with good ranking you can use for testing/previewing your themes:
Sarfraz Ahmed's Blog 