The Playground team held its first meeting in a while on Friday, June 13, 2025, at 15:00 UTC. The discussion covered recent developments, contributor updates, and an open floor for questions.
Announcements
Several recent updates and resources for WordPress Playground were shared:
- Workshops: Two recent workshops from WordCampWordCamp WordCamps are casual, locally-organized conferences covering everything related to WordPress. They're one of the places where the WordPress community comes together to teach one another what they’ve learned throughout the year and share the joy. Learn more. Europe were highlighted:
- Recent Developments: A June 2025 “What’s new for developers?” post detailed several Playground enhancements:
- Direct support for data URLs in the
blueprint-urlquery parameter. - The 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. environment now includes the
Intlextension. - A new SQLite driver has been integrated, with more details in this post.
- The CLICLI Command Line Interface. Terminal (Bash) in Mac, Command Prompt in Windows, or WP-CLI for WordPress. now supports mounting the current working directory.
- Dynamic mounting of symlinked directories is now supported.
- Direct support for data URLs in the
- Major Update: A significant recent update also included 64-bit integer support, the
exifextension, a Blueprint bundle format, and numerous stability improvements.
Contributor Updates
Team members shared their current focus:
- @zieladam is concentrating on Blueprints v2, including the specification and an
all-in-one-php-blueprints.pharrunner that can work on any PHP web host. The next steps involve improving Playground CLI compatibility with native PHP. - @fellyph is in his first week of contributing and has been triaging issues. He is also looking into requests for contributor badges, documentation updates, a potential landing page for new users, and has submitted a fix for the mobile view.
- @karthickmurugan noted he has been unable to contribute recently due to other project work but hopes to schedule time for contributions soon.
Open Floor
@janwoostendorp shared his positive experience with the WordCamp Europe workshops and has started writing automated tests for his Default Featured ImageFeatured image A featured image is the main image used on your blog archive page and is pulled when the post or page is shared on social media. The image can be used to display in widget areas on your site or in a summary list of posts. pluginPlugin A plugin is a piece of software containing a group of functions that can be added to a WordPress website. They can extend functionality or add new features to your WordPress websites. WordPress plugins are written in the PHP programming language and integrate seamlessly with WordPress. These can be free in the WordPress.org Plugin Directory https://wordpress.org/plugins/ or can be cost-based plugin from a third-party. He raised a performance question, noting that his tests take about 12 seconds to run in a CI environment, with roughly 8 seconds spent downloading a theme.
@zieladam explained that themes are not currently cached in the CI, but this will be resolved in Blueprints v2, which will implement an HTTPHTTP HTTP is an acronym for Hyper Text Transfer Protocol. HTTP is the underlying protocol used by the World Wide Web and this protocol defines how messages are formatted and transmitted, and what actions Web servers and browsers should take in response to various commands. cache for all resources, not just WordPress coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress.. This will result in a significant speed improvement once the Playground CLI is updated. As a temporary workaround for faster local development, he suggested using a local theme .zip file with a bundled reference in the blueprint.