Imagine if in a few clicks, you could get access to an exact replica of someone else’s WordPress creation and get a peek behind the scenes. Or imagine if you could provide a copy of your site to help with testing against new plugins, themes, or WordPress versions. WordPress Playground makes all this and more possible, including allowing developers to provide a live preview of their plugins before installation via custom blueprints. Now, the project is looking for contributions that can help further enrich the Playground experience and ecosystem.
Meet the Blueprint Gallery, a new community initiative that allows WordPress developers and extenders to share their setups as blueprints with others on GitHub.
What are blueprints?
Blueprints are the configuration files for a Playground instance, written in JSON format. They can list certain settings, like PHP versions, WordPress versions, or steps that the tool should take to set up the right combination of plugins, themes, and content for a demo or a test site.
Blueprints are the meat of the matter: What are the settings and steps that make the demo site a good experience?
The Blueprints 101 page has the technical details. Contributors shared a few blueprint files and methods in an early version of the Blueprint Gallery.
For a more in-depth look, check out the following developer focused articles about WordPress playground.
- Introduction to Playground: running WordPress in the browser
- How to use WordPress Playground for interactive demos
What can you find in the Blueprint Gallery?
You can pick from various examples, ranging from a login step to installing plugins and themes automatically. Additionally, you can import and create content and enable certain experimental features in the Gutenberg plugin. Use wp-cli commands to add several posts or just a single post with a featured image. You can even create a plugin on the fly to add a custom post type to a site or a series of content from one site and import it into a Playground site.
Why consider contributing and sharing?
This new way of testing, previewing, and trying out new things lowers the barriers for new users to experiment and explore WordPress. Contributing to the Blueprint Gallery means helping other developers with blueprints for specific use cases while encouraging the use of Playground for WordPress’s overall growth and innovation. This project is as much about showcasing and sharing your work as it is about reusing and leveraging works others have done, especially for impressive and more involved setups, remixing different configurations, and learning about what WordPress and Playground can do.
How to submit your creations?
There are two prerequisites for a successful submission: You need to be familiar with the pull request process on GitHub and provide a folder that contains all assets and other files needed for the blueprint to work.
During the submission process, you will receive a notification if there is information missing and a link to test your blueprint from our pull request. It’s a fairly smooth process. All the details are available in the Contributing Guidelines.
Post your questions, suggestions, or ideas in the comments, or create an issue on the GitHub repo or join the #meta-playground channel
Props for reviewing to @zieladam @rmartinezduque @annezazu