Michael Nitchinger has a new post to his blog about a rewrite for the Lithium framework - changing up the li3_fixtures plugin to make it a bit more of what the community needs.

The li3_fixtures plugin was my first Lithium plugin ever, and while it works okay, I feel there is a lot I can do to make it better and more flexible. In this post I want to share my ideas for a new fixture plugin and also want to gather feedback from the community to make it even more awesome.

He gives three instance where fixtures can come in extremely useful - making effective model unit tests with predictable data, mocking models with shortcuts to the data and mocking out web services. Want to add in your own suggestions for his refactor? Comment on the post!