The WordPress ecosystem is constantly evolving and adding new tools to improve user and developer experience. We often need a quick WordPress setup to test something or showcase it. To help users with this, WordPress contributors have built a WordPress Playground. Leveraging the power of web assembly Playground allows the user to run WordPress right in the browser.

One can visit https://playground.wordpress.net to spin an on-demand personal WordPress setup. One can visit the plugin or theme section and upload the zip file to install. A plugin or theme can be installed using the URL. For example, to spin a WordPress setup with Gutenberg, one would need to https://playground.wordpress.net/?plugin=gutenberg.

We have been using Playground internally a lot for testing out plugins, and quick demos for internal or client meetings. We often find a plugin or theme that we would like to test drive. It involves copying slug got theme or plugin and using them in URL. To make this quick we thought of building and quick browser extension to add a button on wordpress.org to quickly launch a plugin or theme in the Playground.

Currently, the browser extension is more of a POC (proof of concept) we would like to extend it with more settings based on feedback and usage. The further goal is to get this on wordpress.org so users don’t have to rely on any browser extension. We will keep this extension around for experimentation.

The source code for the extension is open source and open for contribution and collaboration. The extension is available on Chrome extensions for usage.