Fellyph Cintra 11:33 am on January 28, 2026
Tags: meeting

WordPress Playground Team Meeting Summary: January 23, 2026

Facilitator: @fellyph

The Playground team held its weekly meeting on January 23, 2026, in the #playground SlackSlack Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/ channel. Here’s a summary of the discussion.

Announcements

PHPPHP PHP (recursive acronym for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor) is a widely-used open source general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for web development and can be embedded into HTML. https://www.php.net/manual/en/preface.php version support update: WordPress Playground has dropped support for PHP 7.2 and 7.3. While this change is scheduled for WordPress 7.0, Playground has implemented it early. See the Playground blog for details.

AI agent skills: @bpayton has created an Agent Skill for testing WordPress applications on Playground. An announcement post is in progress. The team encourages community testing and contributions. Additionally, Automattic has released a set of Agent Skills, including one for Playground.

Newsletter: The Playground blog now offers a newsletter subscription. Sign up via the form on the blog sidebarSidebar A sidebar in WordPress is referred to a widget-ready area used by WordPress themes to display information that is not a part of the main content. It is not always a vertical column on the side. It can be a horizontal rectangle below or above the content area, footer, header, or any where in the theme. to receive updates.

Contributors: The Playground project now has 53 members with the Playground Contributor Badge.

Translations: Thanks to @noruzzaman for submitting Bengali pages and @Béryl for reviewing French translations. Contact @fellyph if you want to get involved.

Project Updates

Personal Playground: @akirk is developing Personal Playground, a new feature currently in review. Feedback is welcome on the PR.
PHP synchronous connect(): A PR simplifies connection logic for Asyncify builds by replacing asynchronous approaches with synchronous connections.
Node.js upgrade: The project has upgraded from Node.js 20 to 22, enabling package updates.
Agent documentation: The project has added a CLAUDE.md file. The team discussed renaming it to AGENTS.md for broader compatibility with tools like Gemini CLICLI Command Line Interface. Terminal (Bash) in Mac, Command Prompt in Windows, or WP-CLI for WordPress., Cursor, and Copilot. The proposed solution is to use AGENTS.md as the main file with CLAUDE.md referencing it.
Image optimization: @fellyph updated all PNG images in the documentation to WebP, reducing image sizes by 78%.

Updates from Contributors

@zieladam: Helping @akirk review and merge the “My WordPress” project before February. Shipped Redis and Memcached extensions and added native DNSDNS DNS is an acronym for Domain Name System - how you assign a human readable address to a website’s exact numeric coded location (ie. wordpress.org uses the actual IP address 198.143.164.252). resolution for the JSPI Node.js flavor of Playground.
@fellyph: Working on CSSCSS CSS is an acronym for cascading style sheets. This is what controls the design or look and feel of a site. improvements and CSS tokens for the Playground website. Created a PR to add translation credit footers.
@bph: Published two blog posts for theme developers:
- How to Build an Interactive WordPress Theme Demo with Playground Blueprints (WordPress.comWordPress.com An online implementation of WordPress code that lets you immediately access a new WordPress environment to publish your content. WordPress.com is a private company owned by Automattic that hosts the largest multisite in the world. This is arguably the best place to start blogging if you have never touched WordPress before. https://wordpress.com/ blog)
- Streamlining block theme development with WordPress Playground and GitHub (Developer blog)
@bpayton: Working on stabilizing the experimental multi-workers feature to remove the “experimental” flag and improve default performance.

Open Floor

The team briefly discussed CSS tokens and whether anyone has used the CSS tokens from @wordpress/theme.

The next Playground meeting is scheduled for the 13th of February 2026. Join the conversation at #playground Slack channel.

#meeting

Bero 11:04 am on December 16, 2024
Tags: meeting, summary ( 3 )

Playground Team Meeting Summary – December 13, 2024

The Playground team met to discuss recent updates, ongoing projects, and community questions. (Slack script) facilitated by @berislavgrgicak

Announcements

Enabled CORS Proxy for all network requests. This gives WordPress running inside Playground more access to cross origin resources. Limitations still apply around allowed headers and download sizes. Props to @brandonpayton
The new and experimental Data Liberation importer is now available in the importWxr step if you use the "importer": "data-liberation" option. The new importer rewrites links in the imported content, downloads assets through Playground’s CORS proxy, parallelizes the downloads, and communicates progress live.
WP cron is now enabled in Playground
We used the Playground tester to compare the error rate of the top 1000 WordPress.org plugins. In 2023 7% of plugins failed, and today it’s 5%.

Contributor Updates

Data Liberation Efforts:
- @zieladam added a experimental integration to the importWxr step.
- @zaerl is working on topological sorting of WXR entities.
- @bpayton created a WXR + uploads export package.
- Experimental Markdown importer in the importWxr step.
SQLite Integration:
- @janjakesjanjakes is focused on implementing MySQLMySQL MySQL is a relational database management system. A database is a structured collection of data where content, configuration and other options are stored. https://www.mysql.com information_schema into SQLite.
- Next: translating ALTER TABLE statements.
Playground Tester:
- Tests will be able to run automatically after we add support for GitHubGitHub GitHub is a website that offers online implementation of git repositories that can easily be shared, copied and modified by other developers. Public repositories are free to host, private repositories require a paid subscription. GitHub introduced the concept of the ‘pull request’ where code changes done in branches by contributors can be reviewed and discussed before being merged by the repository owner. https://github.com/ actions to push reports.
- @berislavgrgicak prototyped Playwright tests for the Tester.
Workshop:
- @psykro and @berislavgrgicak delivered a WordPress Playground for developers workshop.

Open Floor

Should Playground load if Blueprint steps fail?
- We would like to improve error messages and how they are displayed.
- We discussed if Blueprint authors should be able to allowed a step to fail, but concluded it might cause issues.

Thank you to all contributors for your participation! Stay tuned for updates in SlackSlack Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/ and on the Make WordPress blog.

#summary #meeting

Props to @zieladam for reviewing.

Birgit Pauli-Haack 3:44 pm on November 22, 2024
Tags: meeting, summary ( 3 )

Playground Team Meeting Summary – November 22, 2024

The Playground team met to discuss recent updates, ongoing projects, and community questions. (Slack script) facilitated by Birgit Pauli-Haack

Announcements

New Features:
- Playground’s WordPress PR and GutenbergGutenberg The Gutenberg project is the new Editor Interface for WordPress. The editor improves the process and experience of creating new content, making writing rich content much simpler. It uses ‘blocks’ to add richness rather than shortcodes, custom HTML etc. https://wordpress.org/gutenberg/ PR tester can now be accessed via the three-dot menu, with a modal for PR number input. @ajotka and @bpayton
- A blockBlock Block is the abstract term used to describe units of markup that, composed together, form the content or layout of a webpage using the WordPress editor. The idea combines concepts of what in the past may have achieved with shortcodes, custom HTML, and embed discovery into a single consistent API and user experience.-based Blueprints Editor, created by @ajitbohra, enables building Blueprints visually without JSONJSON JSON, or JavaScript Object Notation, is a minimal, readable format for structuring data. It is used primarily to transmit data between a server and web application, as an alternative to XML..
Upcoming Hallway Hangouts:
- November 29, 2024 (14:00 UTC): Walkthrough of the block-based Blueprints Editor with @ajitbohra and @zieladam.
- December 6, 2024 (14:00 UTC): Discussion on agency use cases for Playground with @karmatosed and @zieladam.
- Details to follow in SlackSlack Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/ and on the Make blog.

Contributor Updates

Blueprints Development:
- @bpayton reported that discussions are ongoing about integrating Blueprint workflows with a wizard-like content creation flow and developing a Blueprint package format to bundle assets.
Database Support:
- @janjakes shared that Advanced MySQL support now includes the new merged MySQL parser. Progress on the new SQLite driver continues. You can follow along here
Playground Compatibility Tester Enhancements:
- It now tests all WordPress.orgWordPress.org The community site where WordPress code is created and shared by the users. This is where you can download the source code for WordPress core, plugins and themes as well as the central location for community conversations and organization. https://wordpress.org/ themes and plugins for compatibility with Playground. Next step for @berislavgrgicak integrating a runner for continuous updates.
Data Liberation Efforts:
- More PRs were merged and can be followed along on the tracking issue. Improvements to the next-gen importer include streaming data from WXR files, parsing markdown, downloading assets, resuming interrupted imports, and rewriting URLs. Upcoming work includes progress updates and handling complex WXR inputs.

Open Floor

CORS Proxy Update:
- A new CORS proxy has been deployedDeploy Launching code from a local development environment to the production web server, so that it's available to visitors. on the Playground domain, with plans to move it to a dedicated domain.
- Contributors discussed the impact of the proxy move and the need to update documentation once the domain stabilizes.

Thank you to all contributors for your participation! Stay tuned for updates in Slack and on the Make WordPress blog.

#summary #meeting

Announcements

Project Updates

Updates from Contributors

Open Floor

Announcements

Contributor Updates

Open Floor

Announcements

Contributor Updates

Open Floor

Site resources