Ever needed to test how your WooCommerce store handles hundreds of orders? Or wanted to see how your custom theme displays with a full catalog of products? We’ve got you covered. Let’s talk about WooCommerce Smooth Generator, a powerful testing tool that just got even better with our latest update.
What is Smooth Generator?
Smooth Generator is our open-source tool that helps you populate WooCommerce stores with realistic test data. Instead of manually creating products, orders, and customers for testing, you can generate them automatically with just a few commands.
Here’s what you can create:
- Products: Generate a variety of product types, including simple, variable, and grouped products, complete with descriptions, prices, and images. Also generate product categories, and specify how many levels of hierarchy they have, as well as product tags.
- Orders: Create realistic orders to test the checkout process, including various payment methods and order statuses.
- Customers: Populate your store with customer accounts to simulate user interactions and test features like registration and account management.
- Coupons: Set up coupons with random codes and amounts.
The best part? Smooth Generator creates a diverse set of test data to simulate a real store environment. Product names are creatively generated and use placeholder images, allowing the tool to excel at producing a variety of interconnected data. Customer names resemble actual names, order patterns mimic typical shopping behaviors, and the generated content provides a practical foundation for thorough testing of your WooCommerce store’s functionality and performance.
Why use Smooth Generator?
If you’re developing themes, building custom plugins, or setting up new stores, you need realistic data to:
- Test how your store handles large catalogs.
- Verify performance under different load conditions.
- Ensure your custom features work with various scenarios.
- Demo your work to clients with realistic-looking data.
- Test WooCommerce updates in a safe environment.
What’s new: v1.2.1 improvements
We’ve just released version 1.2.1, bringing several improvements to make your testing workflow even smoother:
Better feedback and control
- Clear progress tracking during data generation (no more wondering how long it’ll take).
- Precise control over order dates and payment status.
- Consistent device attribution for better analytics testing.
Enhanced stability
- Fixed locale-related issues.
- Updated to the latest FakerPHP library for more realistic data.
- Added support for campaign attribution testing.
These updates come directly from our community’s feedback and contributions, with special thanks to first-time contributors @thetwopct, @msaggiorato, @mikkamp, and @rawdreeg.
Getting started
Whether you’re new to Smooth Generator or updating to the latest version, getting started is straightforward:
- Visit the WooCommerce Smooth Generator repository.
- Follow the installation instructions (it’s just a few steps).
- Run your first command to generate test data.
Join the community
Smooth Generator is built by developers, for developers. We believe in the power of community-driven tools, and there are plenty of ways to get involved:
- Share your use cases and feedback in our Woo Slack Community.
- Report issues or suggest improvements in GitHub.
- Contribute code or documentation to the public repo.
Looking ahead
We’ll continue improving Smooth Generator based on real-world testing needs. Have ideas for new features? Found a way to make it even better? We’d love to hear from you.
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