Fellyph Cintra 9:23 am on October 13, 2025  

WordPress Playground Meeting Summary: October 10, 2025

Location: #playground Slack Channel

The WordPress Playground team held its weekly meeting on October 10, 2024. Here’s a summary of what was discussed.

Announcements

AI-Powered Documentation Search

The team added a new feature to the WordPress Playground documentation that uses AI to answer user questions. The implementation uses kapa.ai and is currently in testing. The team is collecting community feedback. Thanks to @zaerl for implementing this feature.

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. Playground BetaBeta A pre-release of software that is given out to a large group of users to trial under real conditions. Beta versions have gone through alpha testing in-house and are generally fairly close in look, feel and function to the final product; however, design changes often occur as part of the process.

A new PHP Playground beta was released, featuring an IDE-like interface with:

  • File Explorer.
  • Terminal with support for PHP, WP, and Composer commands.
  • Browser-based development capabilities.

This enhancement builds on the previous version created by @zieladam and incorporates community feedback. The new version enables users to use Composer and compile PHP directly from the browser.

Playground Importer Improvements

Thanks to issue reports from @bph, the Playground importer now auto-rewrites URLs from the original site to Playground paths using wordpress-importer 0.9.1+.

CLICLI Command Line Interface. Terminal (Bash) in Mac, Command Prompt in Windows, or WP-CLI for WordPress. Performance Updates

The Playground CLI received performance improvements, now using multi-worker startup by sharing WordPress files via the local filesystem instead of zip copying.

Landing Page Improvements

@zieladam refactored the landing page, improving performance and fixing issues some users experienced due to customizations on the web version of Playground. The team also added a new favicon that is visible in both light and dark modes, addressing feedback from @Krupa.

Merge Activity

Since the last meeting, the team has merged 30 pull requests.

Documentation Updates

The team celebrated translation contributions from @Dilip Modhavadiya, @Béryl, @shimomura Tomoki, and @Shail Mehta, who submitted new translations for French, Japanese, Gujarati, and Tagalog.

@fellyph created a base for Bengali translations and is working with @Muhibul Haque to expand Bengali language support.

Community Highlights

Contributor Badges

Two more community members earned the contributor badge this week, bringing the total to 37 members with contributor badges.

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. Presentations

Several community members presented about WordPress Playground at recent WordCamps:

The team encourages anyone who has given a talk about Playground or created related content to share it so the Resources page can be updated.

Updates from Contributors

@fellyph attended WordCamp Galicia, where he collected community feedback, ran the Playground table at contributor dayContributor Day Contributor Days are standalone days, frequently held before or after WordCamps but they can also happen at any time. They are events where people get together to work on various areas of https://make.wordpress.org/ There are many teams that people can participate in, each with a different focus. https://2017.us.wordcamp.org/contributor-day/ https://make.wordpress.org/support/handbook/getting-started/getting-started-at-a-contributor-day/., reviewed translations in the repository, and prepared the base structure for Bengali translations. He plans to prepare a page for WP Credits in the documentation and update the Playground documentation.

@bpayton worked on updates to make it easier for teams to build and self-host the Playground web app, giving teams control over their deployedDeploy Launching code from a local development environment to the production web server, so that it's available to visitors. version while still being able to use playground.wordpress.net.

@zieladam has been:

  • Testing the new XDebug feature.
  • Exploring full-fledged 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. development in the browser by running Node.js and webpack, which could complement the recently shipped PHP Playground beta.
  • Helping Birgit import navigation menus via WXR and troubleshooting a bug in the process.

@janjakes has been improving the SQLite 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, intending to support PHPMyAdmin in the near future.

Open Floor

Translating the Admin Panel UIUI UI is an acronym for User Interface - the layout of the page the user interacts with. Think ‘how are they doing that’ and less about what they are doing.

@fellyph raised a question about whether the admin panel UI at playground.wordpress.net should be translated. After watching @nilovelez‘s talk about WordPress Playground, he noted it would be helpful if the UI could be explained in the presenter’s native language.

Community feedback:

  • @Moses Cursor noted that people from non-English speaking regions would be encouraged to use Playground more if the interface were available in their language.
  • @bph emphasized that translating the interface would help non-English speakers embrace Playground and broaden its reach into non-developer spaces, such as teaching writing. Without translation, non-English speakers have difficulty using Playground for various purposes.

@fellyph will create an issue to track this feature request.

Next Steps

For more information, join our #playground Slack Channel, and see you in our next chat, which is scheduled for October 24th.