Facilitator: @fellyph
The Playground team held its weekly meeting on January 23, 2026, in the #playground Slack channel. Here’s a summary of the discussion.
Announcements
PHP version support update: WordPress Playground has dropped support for PHP 7.2 and 7.3. While this change is scheduled for WordPress 7.0, Playground has implemented it early. See the Playground blog for details.
AI agent skills: @bpayton has created an Agent Skill for testing WordPress applications on Playground. An announcement post is in progress. The team encourages community testing and contributions. Additionally, Automattic has released a set of Agent Skills, including one for Playground.
Newsletter: The Playground blog now offers a newsletter subscription. Sign up via the form on the blog sidebar to receive updates.
Contributors: The Playground project now has 53 members with the Playground Contributor Badge.
Translations: Thanks to @noruzzaman for submitting Bengali pages and @Béryl for reviewing French translations. Contact @fellyph if you want to get involved.
Project Updates
- Personal Playground: @akirk is developing Personal Playground, a new feature currently in review. Feedback is welcome on the PR.
- PHP synchronous connect(): A PR simplifies connection logic for Asyncify builds by replacing asynchronous approaches with synchronous connections.
- Node.js upgrade: The project has upgraded from Node.js 20 to 22, enabling package updates.
- Agent documentation: The project has added a CLAUDE.md file. The team discussed renaming it to
AGENTS.mdfor broader compatibility with tools like Gemini CLI, Cursor, and Copilot. The proposed solution is to useAGENTS.mdas the main file withCLAUDE.mdreferencing it. - Image optimization: @fellyph updated all PNG images in the documentation to WebP, reducing image sizes by 78%.
Updates from Contributors
- @zieladam: Helping @akirk review and merge the “My WordPress” project before February. Shipped Redis and Memcached extensions and added native DNS resolution for the JSPI Node.js flavor of Playground.
- @fellyph: Working on CSS improvements and CSS tokens for the Playground website. Created a PR to add translation credit footers.
- @bph: Published two blog posts for theme developers:
- How to Build an Interactive WordPress Theme Demo with Playground Blueprints (WordPress.com blog)
- Streamlining block theme development with WordPress Playground and GitHub (Developer blog)
- @bpayton: Working on stabilizing the experimental multi-workers feature to remove the “experimental” flag and improve default performance.
Open Floor
The team briefly discussed CSS tokens and whether anyone has used the CSS tokens from @wordpress/theme.
The next Playground meeting is scheduled for the 13th of February 2026. Join the conversation at #playground Slack channel.