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%.

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 be 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.

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.

Props to @zieladam for reviewing.