**Quick summary:**
I have a Rails app that is a personal checklist / to-do list. Basically, you can log in and manage your to-do list.

**My Question:**
When a user creates a new account, I want to populate their checklist with 20-30 default to-do items. I know I could say:

```
wash_the_car = ChecklistItem.new
wash_the_car.name = 'Wash and wax the Ford F650.'
wash_the_car.user = @new_user
wash_the_car.save!

...repeat 20 times...

```

However, I have 20 ChecklistItem rows to populate, so that would be 60 lines of very damp (aka not DRY) code. There's gotta be a better way.

So I want to use seed the ChecklistItems table from a YAML file when the account is created. The YAML file can have all of my ChecklistItem objects to be populated. When a new user is created -- bam! -- the preset to-do items are in their list.

How do I do this?

Thanks!

(PS: For those of you wondering WHY I am doing this: I am making a client login for my web design company. I have a set of 20 steps (first meeting, design, validate, test, etc.) that I go through with each web client. These 20 steps are the 20 checklist items that I want to populate for each new client. However, while everyone starts with the same 20 items, I normally customize the steps I'll take based on the project (and hence my vanilla to-do list implementation and desire to populate the rows programatically). If you have questions, I can explain further.