The other day I needed to populate a database with some placeholder content. Doing this manually was out of the question so I decided I’d find a text generator, specifically a Lorem Ipsum generator. For anyone unaware, Lorem Ipsum is non-sense, placeholder text used in publishing and design. It allows the developer to see their work completely populated with text, without having to actually create the text. Obviously, for this purpose, any kind of text generator would work to some extent, but traditionally Lorem Ipsum is used.

To get to the point, I successfully located several web-based generators, but no stand-alone PHP class or function. To be honest, I didn’t look too hard and someone a little more determined not to write any code most likely would have found it, but I decided to create my own PHP Lorem Ipsum generator. Here is a rundown of some of the features in the current version: