A Free WordPress Install in Your Browser

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Hey Adam, welcome to the 

Adam Z: program. Hey Matt, thank you so much for having me. 

Matt: Well, we finally connected. It’s been a while. Uh, we were just chatting off screen about all the things that you do, uh, for WordPress at automatic, but for folks who don’t know who you are, Adam, what is it that you do at automatic day to day?

Adam Z: I, uh, am the architect [00:02:00] of a WordPress playground. I spent 100 percent of my time contributing to the open source WordPress project these days in form of WordPress playground. I’m WordPress core contributor, uh, and core committer. And that’s what I do. 

Matt: Were you the one who came up with the idea 

Adam Z: of the playground?

Yeah, I was trying to write a tutorial about, um, I think it was Gutenberg data layer. Uh, so using WordPress REST API in JavaScript in the Gutenberg editor. And, uh, while I was writing it, I had a problem. I had to explain how to set up WordPress and get to a point where you can start writing the actual JavaScript code.

And it involved downloading things using Git, uh, installing NPM, Notepad, like a lot of things. And I was thinking to myself, well, what if that could just work in the browser? What if you never had to go through any of that setup, right? I want people to. Open the tutorial and just start going from there.

And [00:03:00] I thought, yeah, but I would need a server farm for that. But what if WordPress could run in the browser? Well, but it couldn’t, but what if it could, and turns out. That was possible. And that’s what WordPress playground has 

Matt: become. One of the things that, you know, I think from the outside, so I do a lot of tutorials on the YouTube channel, youtube.

com slash at WP minute, and I showcase playground often because I’m testing out a new plugin, testing out a new theme and why go to my, you know, pressable or blue host account to change or, you know, make a new staging when I can just do it right here. for this temporary moment and showcase whatever it is that, that I’m showing off.

I think from the outside, a lot of folks might look at that and go, Oh, it’s WordPress hosting. It’s instant WordPress hosting. Right? It’s just this thing. It’s, it’s there and WordPress is there. I want to help folks appreciate it a bit more through this conversation. This runs in the browser, right? So this is actually operating in the browser.[00:04:00] 

There’s no, there’s no host. There’s no server serving up those WordPress pages and database. Yeah. 

Adam Z: It’s just static files. Uh, you go to a page, your browser downloads a bunch of, uh, zip archives and there it goes. It runs in the browser. If you turn off your internet. While we have Playground open, you’ll still be able to use that WordPress.

You’ll be able to create new pages, customize your theme, export the entire thing as a zip archive if you lose connectivity, that’s pretty useful. And then restore it later on. Yeah. Like all of that, including the database, including the PHP, like actual WordPress code, uh, works in your browser and you can install themes from the plugin, uh, from the theme directory, plugins from the plugin directory.

It’s not like there are some technical limitations, but Most 

Matt: of it is there. There is a, I don’t want to say it’s an alternative because it’s, it, it is a completely different product when you open up the hood, but there is a product called Insta WP. I’ve done some videos on that. I think automatic is actually a seed investor or [00:05:00] a, uh, an investor at some level.

That’s a totally different product. That’s a hosted service, probably has a server farm. is running your traditional hosting stack. Are there, do you chat with that team? Do you look at what they’re doing or do you see this as a complimentary product when they run side by side with each other? 

Adam Z: Oh yeah, I’ve had some chats, uh, with, uh, Vikas from InstaWP and, uh, yeah, I would say at the moment it is, uh, complimentary.

So if you want to, uh, create something, I create a WordPress site for a workshop and then you want to. share that exact site live for someone else to maybe modify and, uh, for those updates to be visible online, you need a hosting, right? Like Playground cannot do that for you just yet. Maybe, uh, maybe at one point.

So for that, InstaWP, yeah, like that would be, A better, uh, a better option. There are also some plugins that require you to actually have a [00:06:00] hosting environment, right? So, uh, I think one of them would be, uh, I think one of them is actually Jetpack, uh, from Automatic, right? So you need a domain name that Jetpack would be able to connect to for, for backups, different things.

Well, with Playground, you don’t have a domain, right? It’s just running in your browser. So that would be another limitation, uh, and also for showcasing something like that, uh, InstaWP would be more useful. 

Matt: Yeah, I noticed that when you go to the playground, I often forget when I jump in and sometimes I’m recording a video and then I say, okay, so we’ll just jump over to add a new plug in and I’ll start to search all that the network connection has to be enabled, right?

I have to go and I have, ah, that’s right. I have to stop and I have to go get that’s, um, that’s just like probably what, like, just like a security thing, or that’s, that’s just how you’ve framed up like one of the, I don’t know, yeah. Testing elements. I don’t have a better word for it, but why is the network disabled boots up a playground site?

It’s such 

Adam Z: a good question. It’s disabled by default to make playground faster [00:07:00] So JavaScript is a programming language that has a synchronicity Built in so you can start a network request and the rest of our program keeps running but PHP is a is synchronous, right? Everything happens sequentially, line by line.

So if you open WP admin and it reaches out a couple of times to WP. org, well, the rest of the, uh, WordPress has to wait, uh, for these, uh, connections to, to finish, right? And it can noticeably slow down, uh, WordPress inside Playground. So I disabled networking by default as a. UX affordance, I’d say, although I get a lot of questions about that.

So I’m not sure if that’s that option is so useful, uh, by default. If it’s not, let me know on GitHub or, uh, or on Twitter. And yeah, let’s discuss that. Like it’s not a definite technical requirement. It’s my opinion. 

Matt: Yeah. And look, it’s not that for anyone [00:08:00] who’s experienced it or is going to go try Playground, uh, today after listening to this.

It’s not that bad. You go to the options, you go to the settings page, you check off network access, you click on apply changes. It’s not that bad. And I would say, you know, you’re thinking of making this quick and snappy is certainly an advantage over if I can just, if I can just check off network access later in my experience of booting up and getting into 2024 and just playing with WordPress, if that’s the advantage.

I mean, that makes sense to me. 

Adam Z: Yeah. And it’s also related to something you mentioned before we started recording how you’ve been using playground lately, and it was super snappy for you, right? Like that’s, that’s a part of it. And it comes at a price of the slight annoyance, but I think it’s worth it.

Matt: Let’s just talk about performance again, realizing that I’m not a developer. The last code I wrote was a little bit of HTML. The speed, the performance, the improvements there. Is that a balance of optimizing your code? And how much of [00:09:00] browser technology do you have to pay attention to? Like, there’s M1 chips, M2 chips in the Mac, but then there’s Brave, Chrome, Safari.

Do you have to actually optimize for each browser as well when you’re making this playground? 

Adam Z: Fortunately, not because that would be a lot of work, 

Matt: uh, playgrounds, so 

Adam Z: many runtimes out there, so many browsers and, uh, browsers, a site playground can also run on node JS in VS code, uh, as a native app, uh, as block nodes.

So there’s really a whole lot more than just the browsers and yeah, like optimizing for every single one of these. That would be way beyond, uh, way beyond like a single person or like even a single team project. No, Playground uses something called WebAssembly, uh, which is a universal, uh, way of building, uh, software.

Let me just call it that. So normally if you install PHP on your computer, [00:10:00] you, uh, download a, uh, package that’s Optimized for your specific CPU. So maybe, uh, M1 Mac or Intel processor, uh, with WebAssembly, uh, you get a bundle like a PHP build that can run on any CPU, which is very convenient and also abstracts that, uh, part away.

So. So, optimization wise, it’s been, uh, actually much more about, uh, networking than about any low level details of PHP. So what takes up the most time, uh, when you open up Playground is downloading things. I think the initial page load, that’s about maybe 10 or 15 megabytes. of data. And then as you load WordPress and you go through WP Admin, we don’t preload everything, like every single script, because that would be, uh, like twice as much downloads.

Uh, so when you go through WP Admin, you, you’ll notice in your browser DevTools, uh, Playground actually reaches out for more [00:11:00] scripts, uh, as it needs them. Uh, it happens on demand. There is some caching involved to avoid downloading the same thing multiple times. And in the future, I want to have, um, an event, uh, an even smarter caching layer.

So right now, maybe things would expire before they need to, or maybe not everything, uh, everything that can be cached would be cached. And ideally I’d like it to be very smart, resilient system where you, every single file you downloaded, like one file. only once and it stays with you until you need a more recent 

Matt: version.

For those that are just listening, I’m watching Adam really think this through as he’s talking about it and I can see the wheels turning. Um, and just to, and just to show off my stripes, Adam, back in the day I used to run, I was a strictly a Linux systems admin and I used to run a desktop version called Gentoo where I had to compile everything.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I used to know how to do this stuff. you know, whatever. Life moves on. [00:12:00] Uh, I’m curious and maybe this is like, so future, uh, uh, so out in your roadmap or, or, you know, future thinking, or maybe it’s not even possible. Could the playground eventually evolve into. like, uh, I don’t know what, what Chrome calls them.

I guess they’re just called Chrome apps, right? Where they’re just run locally. And I could kind of just build a business website, an e commerce website, and I could just store these on my browser and then just go right back to them at any point in time. Is that a future thing we could have 

Adam Z: someday? I’m really glad you mentioned this use case.

Uh, let me take a step back. Actually. Uh, I think playground could so much more than that. So, Let’s talk about distributed WordPress. Playground, right now, it works in your browser. And there’s a few ways you can get data in and out of Playground, but it’s not that portable. Like it takes some effort. Maybe you can export a zip file and it comes [00:13:00] with a database, yada yada.

Like point is, It’s mostly confined in there unless you have some technical knowledge. However, I would really like to develop a system, and that’s actually in progress, where Playground can synchronize data with your actual WordPress instance. So maybe you would go to your blog or company website and in WP Admin, you would say, Oh, I want to try out some things.

So you click a button and you get a copy of that site inside Playground. And then you can You know, play with a theme, create a couple of pages, click commit, and all these changes go back into your production site, or you just close your tab and nothing ever happened, right? You can just experiment freely.

So let’s take that a bit further and say, instead of just transferring entire sites, maybe a WordPress and playground could exchange data in real time, uh, at which point things get really interesting. I can have a [00:14:00] local development environment. And do some things in, uh, in here and they get synchronized to staging, right?

So then I can send a link to that staging to someone and maybe that’s my client. And Hey, like this page is, uh, I think it’s finished and they say, Oh, but I really want this photo, uh, in the header. So we go, sure. You make a change locally. And it’s now available. Taking this a step further, well, these days, uh, a lot of development is about edge computing, so you can run software on edge servers.

Uh, you can run databases on edge servers. Like, uh, I think CloudFlare came up with the SQLite system. Suppose WordPress could run on edge servers and because, because Playground works with SQLite, make the database, uh, bit fits nicely in there. So. You have this, uh, edge, uh, infrastructure, you deploy WordPress in there and all these WordPresses, they exchange data directly with each other.

Right? So suddenly you find yourself in a place where [00:15:00] you don’t even have a centralized server. Maybe you don’t even need that. Uh, these. Edge notes, they could be talking to a staging environment or your local dev setup. Or maybe you could visit that website from your phone and your phone would actually download WordPress and run it locally.

And now you have a PWA, right? You can run that website without internet. You go into a tunnel and you can start. So you can still keep shopping in that e commerce store, or there’s, there’s so much in here, right? You could have editorial workflows with this type of data synchronization. You have a website where you work on your content and you only release the finished bits to the actual production, maybe, I don’t know, like mynews.

com or whatever the address would be. And so back to your question about a local environment where you can create a site with an offline app. I think so. Very much, and I would love that functionality to not be playground specific, but to be part of WordPress core. [00:16:00] So, maybe playground would be just this thin layer that brings WordPress to all the JavaScript environments out there.

So, maybe Chrome apps, maybe mobile phones, tablets, IDE extensions for developers, like even your smart fridge, if you, if you want that for some reason. 

Matt: Gutenberg blocks on my, uh, on my fridge. So as I’m pulling out the milk, I’m checking off the thing that’s in there. I assume you must. probably collaborate or at least chat every once in a while with Jesse Friedman, who runs the WP Cloud Initiative, because I feel like this stuff would sync up fairly well with that.

Is, are you in communications with that project internally to, uh, to Automattic? 

Adam Z: Yeah, there are some, uh, there are some common bits. And, uh, and overlaps. I’ve been in touch with Jesse a couple of times. Do you have, like, any specific, uh, angle around that you would like to explore? 

Matt: Well, no, because I know he’s building out, or at least the last time I interviewed him, I’ve known [00:17:00] Jesse, you know, years and years ago.

He used to, he actually still lives, uh, probably, like, I don’t know, half hour away from me. We used to be in the same WordPress meetup. At least I still think he lives that close to me. Uh, but the last time I interviewed him, we were just taught, he, he was just getting WP cloud, sort of the marketing site was getting off the ground and he was talking about how it’s the infrastructure for WordPress hosts.

And then I just imagine. You know, when you start, you know, edge computing, caching, uh, sort of having this distributed model, maybe he is kind of, he and team, I don’t know what the team is, uh, is maybe leading that charge. And, and this could be something that, you know, syncs well with one another, right?

Gotcha. So I just, I was just curious if there was a thing that, that was there. That, that. Ability to, I love the idea of having it in WordPress core for sure. And I remember I used to sell hosting for a company called Pagely before they sold to GoDaddy. And man, I tell you like staging sites, content specifically, like you have the development cycle, but all the while [00:18:00] publishers are publishing content, sites being built, people are publishing content that doesn’t stop.

And that was always a thing is like, we’re going to deploy that new site. We’re going to deploy the new code for the new theme. Oh, by the way, halt any publishing and try telling that to, you know, back then we had Wirecutter as a, as a client before they were acquired by New York Times and, and, you know, and any number of publishers, content, syncing content.

huge challenge. So something like this, I’d imagine would really help. 

Adam Z: Yeah. And I’ve seen a bunch of, like, really quite a few WordPress companies that have this exact problem where, all right, we’re making some changes on staging. Like we work with that. We occasionally deploy to production, but then another team creates content in production.

Not going through staging. So now these two databases diverge. What do we do? Because we already have some changes on staging. Like, do we scrape that? Do we reconcile that manually? How do we [00:19:00] proceed? Yeah. Like I’d say quite, uh, quite a challenge and especially with larger publishers, maybe your database can have 100 gigabytes, right?

You’re not going to reason about that manually. You need a tool that will solve that for you. 

Matt: Yeah, 100%. I’ve always. Uh, you know, I, when I first got into WordPress, uh, I came from the Drupal world. I came from when Drupal 4 was going to Drupal 5 and then, uh, I worked at another company. We acquired a web development agency, befriended the designer and when I led that team, the designer was like, we have to leave Drupal.

I can’t design for it. Now this is. It’s years and years and years ago, obviously he’s like, there’s this thing called WordPress. We got to go with WordPress cause I can design sites for this thing and it’s up and coming yada, yada, yada, all this stuff. One of the things that drove me to WordPress when I first started to explore the community was Matt Mullenweg’s vision of WordPress as the internet’s operating system.

And that still is today. Like the thing that, you know, runs in the back of my [00:20:00] head that I really enjoy about that sentiment. Gutenberg is one of those things where him, you know, We moved it to a direction where it’s block based now and, and is JavaScript that powers a lot of this stuff. I don’t know how to do it.

I used to open up WordPress sites and hack away at HTML, PHP, uh, and CSS. And that was how I kind of learned this stuff. Now I don’t touch the JavaScript stuff. But I feel like from somebody who might come into the WordPress space, As a non techie, like never touched HTML, CSS, knows nothing about code, you kind of are building coding blocks when you’re putting literal blocks on a page.

Like somebody who’s non technical, that, this could feel powerful because you’re taking bits of functionality, plopping them onto a page by hitting the slash command and putting in a thing, and that can unlock the same imagination that I had back in the day when I first started to explore this stuff.

This is a long way of getting to. I really see Gutenberg as in [00:21:00] blocks. Um, I should say blocks, not just Gutenberg blocks as this code, this way to code WordPress. And I see the playground having a lot of synergy with that. Want to boot up my coding environment and build a WordPress app, playground.

wordpress. net start coding. And then I can export and launch this. Does the team share that same sort of sentiment, that same outlook with coding air quotes with WordPress in the 

Adam Z: future? Definitely. There’s a lot of excitement about this use case and a bunch of technical examples around specifically Gutenberg blocks.

Actually, they already have a live demo links, uh, Set up with playground ideally learned at wordpress. org or wordpress. org in general if you’re a developer and you just want to Try to write a plugin or build a simple theme. Maybe the code editor could be just there, right? You open a link and that’s it.

You can start building code. Maybe there are even some interactive [00:22:00] Examples to pre populate that editor, right? Oh, so here’s a plugin that just changes a site title But here’s a plugin that registers a Gutenberg block so this problem of Oh, Gutenberg uses JavaScript. There’s a lot of build tools, uh, required.

Maybe we could solve at least a little bit of that with Playground by giving you pre sort of cookie cutter templates for for blog development, uh, that you can just start in your browser. I actually managed to build, uh, two small WordPress plugins using just Playground. And that was, uh, quite an enlightening moment for me.

Uh, because I, I knew I build features to make that possible, but then I actually use that to experience, uh, how it works. And yeah, like that I recommend, like, if you’re listening to that one, uh, and you’re building a, WordPress plugin. I highly recommend you try that. Uh, it’s really interesting to, to observe.

Like you always [00:23:00] needed this Apache setup and development stack. And now all of that is just gone. It’s just a web browser. Playground now has this feature that allows you to load a local directory. directly into the browser. So you can develop the plugin on your computer and then like it just magically shows up in Playground.

Now there’s this, uh, online code editor vscode. dev that allows you also to load a local directory in the browser. So you can do something like um, take your tablet, open two browser tabs, one with Playground. Actually, I’m not sure if that API works on a tablet. So, uh, you take your Mac, you open two tabs, Playground and VSCode.

dev. And you don’t even need a code editor installed on your computer, right? That’s ultimate accessibility. So regardless of whether that’s about development or just using WordPress, I would love Playground, uh, to see playground all over the educational [00:24:00] materials for the WordPress community, just to make things interactive, right?

Like why show screenshots of the same command, uh, is it command palette? Uh, I think that’s the, that’s what, uh, the, yeah, this new tool is called. So why show screenshots of the command palette where you can, when you can show the command palette? I’m 

Matt: looking at the options, settings, options, uh, for those just listening, uh, definitely check out playground.

wordpress. net. I’m sure you will. As soon as you listen to this. So we talked earlier by default, you can switch the storage type to, it starts at none, uh, or browser stored in the browser, uh, and then device stored locally in your device. That’s a beta, not supported in my browser. Cause I just have this up in Safari.

Then you could change the PHP versions from version, um, I’ll just go from top down 8. 3 down to 7. 0 load extensions and then network access. And then you can change. And this is, you know, probably when you’re listening to this, okay, what am I going to do with playground? What else can I do with this? Why else is this valuable to me is I can switch versions of [00:25:00] WordPress.

I can go all the way as granular as WordPress nightly to get the nightly Crazy bleeding edge version of WordPress to see the changes coming and WordPress 6. 5 beta one, and then six, four, three, two, and one all the way down the line. This again is one of those things that playground needs to be in every, I forget what they call the posts, but like, here’s what’s coming in WordPress 6.

5. Here’s what’s coming in Gutenberg, 17 point, blah, blah, blah. Because WordPress Folks can actually experience it, see those changes being posted by, by the core team. They can see that, you know, they can talk, read that material and say, Oh, these are the changes coming to, uh, to blocks and the editor and site editor and navigation, yada, yada.

And then you can just go play with it. in the playground. And those two definitely need to merge. 

Adam Z: It’s starting to happen where this new 6. 5, uh, better, uh, that was just released on this Tuesday in the release post, [00:26:00] there’s actually a section about trying it out in playground. And there was a link that takes you to playground with that better with some development plugins and even plugins to report any issues you may encounter during your testing.

And I’d love to see more of that. In the future. Definitely. That’s, this is where playground especially shines. Like just show me the stuff. Don’t, don’t tell me to install things. Right. Just give me the link. Yeah. 

Matt: And then I’ll push you a little bit further as the crazy product guy who always asked the engineering team for far too much, having some kind of, uh, I think all, all of us like marketing and business people sort of like fall back to this style of, of thing, but having some kind of overlay to provide feedback.

dynamically for those new features, right? Can we pipe this information directly back to the core team for feedback? Because man, that would, I think that would be great for people to say, Hey, we’ve got the new 2025 theme coming. Give it a spin on Playground, uh, and, [00:27:00] you know, tell us what you think. And maybe we can have, you know, modals that pop up and say, Hey, okay, what do you think about this feature?

Or just like a form that sits there and says, Hey, what did you think about 2025? And that would be a fan. I mean, at least in my eyes would be probably a fantastic way to start gathering feedback in real time for these features that are coming. 

Adam Z: 100 percent 

Matt: agreed. One other thing that I want to pull attention to, uh, you call them options or settings.

What do you, what do you, how do you refer to these two menus? I don’t want to use the wrong terminology for you. Uh, 

Adam Z: there’s, there isn’t any specific terminology. I would actually love to get this, uh, if you redesigned, like this is very much of a developer UI, what you’re seeing right now. Yeah. So 

Matt: There’s the, do they still call it the hamburger menu?

There’s the hamburger menu in the upper right hand corner. And when you click that, you have a bunch of other options you have here. You have reset the site, download as zip. I can build this thing and it’ll export probably WP content folder. I’d imagine not the whole instance of, of WordPress, but then I could take that zip, [00:28:00] come back later, two weeks from now and upload it with the restore from zip feature.

And then there’s two other really interesting things. And this is sort of along the same lines of what we were just talking about. You can import from GitHub and you can export pull requests to GitHub. How does that work? It, is that an easy thing to do for the newbie out there that sees something happening in GitHub and go, Oh, I want to try that.

How does that all work for somebody who’s never used it, never used GitHub before? You want to try life? Yeah, I do. I do. Go ahead. You can, you can explain it to me. 

Adam Z: Uh, well, if you’ve never used GitHub before, interacting with GitHub might be challenging. Right? So let’s assume you actually have some knowledge about GitHub and maybe you have a GitHub account because you have to connect that, uh, to, to Playground.

So, um, like you click that option, you get a model that tells you connect your GitHub account and by the way, no data is stored in [00:29:00] playground. It’s like all sort of, uh, temporary, like lives in your browser. So nothing to worry about there. And then, uh, you’re able to specify. GitHub repo, uh, that you want to import into Playground and maybe a subdirectory in that repo and say, oh, is it WP content, uh, directory?

Is it a theme? Is it a plugin? Uh, you just click a button and all of that comes into Playground. As if you, uh, Uploaded a plugin zip file in WP admin, right? It’s, it’s the same mechanics. And then you can interact with that as with any regular WordPress. But the really cool part is, uh, if you synchronize to your local directory and do some development there, or maybe, um, you just go through the UI tools and, uh, change some of your site data or change your theme using just WP admin.

This, uh, has, uh, like this affects the database. And in some cases, this also affects what files, uh, you have in WP content, right? So maybe a [00:30:00] template file changed, or maybe you added a style sheet in your local directory. So just to pro, uh, uh, enable you to preserve these changes and share them with other developers, there is this export to GitHub feature, uh, where you can say, Oh.

Let’s create a pull request for a repo. And if you import it from a GitHub repo earlier, that’s not a prerequisite, but if you did that, then it will propose you, yeah, let’s export it to the same repo where this came from, to the same directory, you click a button and There is a pull request in GitHub. One really cool use case for that is sharing your playground instances, right?

So right now you cannot really share a link to a live playground, but what you can do is you can customize a playground and you can export that to GitHub. Even as a pull request, you don’t even have to merge it. But once you have that pull request, you can, uh, [00:31:00] share a link to that pull request with someone else and they’ll be able to import it on their end.

So this is a, the closest thing to hosting there is in Playground right now, which is going through GitHub as a storage layer. 

Matt: Yeah, just going through that. It’s pretty, uh, that’s pretty amazing. Yeah. So many use cases and yeah. If everyone just knew GitHub a little bit more, we, we, we wouldn’t have, we wouldn’t have, cause look, when I was, I’ve been talking to a lot of, um, You know, I have one of these predictions I have for 2024, you know, I’m not the only one to have this prediction.

I’m sure you, you see it in the team at automatic sees it as well as that. We’re going to have so many newcomers into the WordPress community who don’t really, This is going to sound harsh, but they don’t really love WordPress, like maybe you and I do and the folks listening to this, like they haven’t been here since the beginning, like cracking it open like I did in [00:32:00] versions, you know, two when I started and figuring out how to customize it and just seeing it grow and meeting people in the community.

And then, you know, you’re talking decades. of experiences with humans in the code. And you just love this stuff where now people come in and they like, Hey, I built a site on Elementor. Hey, I built a site with bricks. I built a site using a theme, yada, yada, yada. They didn’t ever experience the pain and the good stuff, uh, that we have over the last, you know, many years.

So now. Coming in like they’re gonna start to expect tools like this, you know to a degree like if they’re gonna really get into WordPress They didn’t come up as a developer and or trying to figure it out because the tool already did it for them, right? They don’t know what the classic editor is They’ve never experienced sidebars and the customized never even existed in there Yeah, widgets, right, widgets, God, building websites with widgets.

So these tools are very, your, your work is very important tools. Like the playground, uh, is very, very important to, you know, smooth those rough [00:33:00] edges over for the folks who are coming in. expecting, um, web flowiness, wixiness, you know, I hate to say that, but that’s what they, that’s what they want because those are the tools that they’re experiencing.

Yeah. 

Adam Z: There’s so much amazing stuff tooling out there right now that regardless of the level, um, of knowledge that you have, you can go to, if you just want to explore ACMS, right. There’s a bunch of options out there that just allows you to like, Uh, go there, explore like login, create some demo pages and host it with a click.

Uh, if you’re a designer, like, as you just said, right, like Webflow, uh, and there are other editors out there as well. If you’re a developer, there’s a bunch of JavaScript, uh, tooling, especially that allows you to run a single command. And there’s an entire development environment, a local dev server, and you run another command and you deploy it to, uh, to a web host.

I would love to see all of that. in WordPress as a, uh, first class feature, right? So, uh, you can use it, you can [00:34:00] learn it, you can share it, you can develop with it, maybe even directly in the browser, maybe even on any device. Maybe you don’t even need to have a computer to, to do that with WordPress, right?

That would be really cool. 

Matt: Yeah. 100 percent playground. wordpress. net wordpress. org slash playground. Adam, anywhere else folks can go to provide feedback for you anywhere else you want them to go to say, thanks. Let them know. Uh, sure. 

Adam Z: So, uh, there’s also a community space, uh, wordpress. org slash playground, where there’s more information about playground.

The best way to reach me at the moment is on Twitter at, uh, Adam Zielin and, uh, via, uh, and on GitHub. On, uh, uh, github. com slash WordPress slash WordPress dash playground. Uh, that’s a great place to leave a feedback, request new feature, uh, features, even start a discussion about anything. And 

Matt: you have a little, uh, uh, alert message on the wordpress.

org slash playground. It says playground is an active exploration. [00:35:00] Oh yeah. And it works reasonably well. And I think it does. I think it does. Fantastic work, my friend. Thank you so much. Thanks for hanging out today. Uh, everybody else, this is the WP Minute, the WPMinute. com slash subscribe, it’s the number one way to stay connected.

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Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next week.[00:36:00]