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Fake Posts Generator

Generate realistic fake posts with Faker content and Picsum images for development and testing.

About this plugin

Fake Posts Generator - Contensio Plugin

Generate realistic fake posts for development and testing. Uses FakerPHP for text content and Picsum Photos for images.

Dev only. This plugin is intended for local and testing environments. A warning banner is shown in the admin UI if the app is running in any other environment.

Features

  • Generate any number of fake posts (1–50 per batch via UI, up to 200 via Artisan)
  • Choose content type, language, and taxonomy terms to assign
  • Fetch and save real photographs from Picsum Photos (1600×900 px, 16:9)
  • All fake posts are tagged with a _fake_post meta key for easy identification
  • One-click "Delete all fake posts" removes posts and their associated media files
  • Artisan command for CI / scripted environments

Usage

Admin UI

Navigate to Settings → Fake Posts in the Contensio admin panel.

  1. Select a Content type
  2. Select a Language
  3. Set the number of posts (1–50)
  4. Optionally enable/disable image fetching
  5. Optionally check taxonomy terms to attach to each post
  6. Click Generate fake posts

To remove all test content, click Delete all fake posts on the same page.

Artisan command

php artisan contensio:fake-posts

Options:

Option Default Description
--count=N 10 Number of posts to generate
--type=post first type Content type name
--terms=1,2,3 none Comma-separated term IDs to attach
--no-images false Skip downloading images from Picsum
--delete false Delete all existing fake posts instead of generating

Examples:

# Generate 20 posts with images
php artisan contensio:fake-posts --count=20

# Generate 5 posts of type "page" without images
php artisan contensio:fake-posts --count=5 --type=page --no-images

# Assign to terms 3, 7, and 12
php artisan contensio:fake-posts --count=10 --terms=3,7,12

# Delete all fake posts and their media
php artisan contensio:fake-posts --delete

How it works

Each generated post:

  1. Creates a contents record (status: published, random published_at within the past year)
  2. Creates a content_translations record with Faker title, slug, excerpt, and HTML body paragraphs
  3. Attaches selected terms via the content_terms pivot table
  4. Inserts a content_meta record: meta_key = _fake_post, meta_value = 1

If images are enabled, each post also:

  1. Fetches a unique photo from https://picsum.photos/seed/{random}/1600/900
  2. Saves the file to storage/app/public/uploads/{year}/{month}/{uuid}.jpg
  3. Creates a media record and a media_translations record (alt text via Faker)
  4. Sets the post's featured_image_id

Deletion

The _fake_post meta key is used to identify all fake posts regardless of other attributes. Deleting collects the featured_image_id values first, then deletes the content records (cascading to translations, meta, and terms), then deletes the media files from disk and the media records.

Requirements

  • PHP fakerphp/faker ^1.23 (declared in composer.json)
  • Network access to picsum.photos for image fetching (skippable with --no-images)