Thanks Ray!

Jelle: I'd disagree with you for a couple of reasons.

Firstly, testing is different from developing.  If, for example, you're trying to improve the speed of a query to return a list of values you don't necessarily have to care about how the values went into the database in the first place. To carry on with that example, you might need 2000 odd records in a forum before you can really see any lag or improvement.  I don't think I'd gain anything by entering the data manually or writing a script to put in lipsum.

Secondly, I've always found that data gathered from a live site with real users is infinitely better than robotic lipsum data because it's generally more variable in quality, size and so forth. If one person is entering all the data then there are going to be patterns in how they use the interface that is less than balanced.

Thirdly, before I came to moodle I played with aTutor for a while and that does include the option to install a 'quickstart' module which I found very useful in getting to grips with the system.  It can be quite intimidating for virgin users to see a totally blank interface and start thinking, "wow, where to begin?"