WordPress By

More than 6,000 people are attending CloudFest in Europa-Park, Germany, this week. A strong contingent of WordPress developers and contributors are among them. During the Hackathon portion of the event, web professionals gather for a friendly competition, tackling problems for existing not-for-profit, OSS projects, creating solutions with a concentrated effort at a quicker pace than remote collaboration usually allows.

Several WordPress-related projects have been put into action at the Hackathon, including the following:

Automattic engineer Daniel Bachhuber published a preview of the in-browser WordPress development environment enabled by an experimental VS Code extension that uses WebAssembly to run WordPress entirely in the browser.

“Forget spending hours setting up a local development environment at your next Contributor Day,” Bachhuber said. “Simply install the WordPress Playground VS Code extension, run ‘Launch WordPress Playground’ from the command launcher, and you’ll have a fully mostly functional WordPress installation right inside your editor.”

Bachhuber emphasized that the extension was built for demonstration purposes but is available on GitHub for anyone who wants to contribute or report bugs. A more in-depth tour of the extension is available on Automattic’s developer blog.

In addition to the VS code previewer for WordPress plugins, the Hackathon team working with WordPress Playground is also experimenting with using the block editor in the browser and working with the Terminal and PHP, wp-cli, and PHPUnit – all in the browser.

The WapuuGotchi project, which aims to gamify WordPress with a customizable Wapuu, notifications, and rewards, has its own Twitter account and website where those interested can follow along with their progress.

image credit: WapuuGotchi Hackathon Wrap-Up

“The audience was captivated as we demonstrated the customizable Wapuu assistant, which can be tailored to suit individual preferences by selecting unique outfits and accessories,” WapuuGotchi design contributor Dennis Hipp said.

“We also highlighted WapuuGotchi’s backend interaction capabilities, showing how it can guide users through updates, provide helpful tips, and offer reminders for important tasks. The presentation concluded with an invitation for Plugin authors to collaborate with us and integrate their Plugins into the WapuuGotchi ecosystem.”

The Wappspector project, which aims to create a CLI utility to analyze the file structure of a web hosting server and identify the frameworks and CMS used in the websites hosted on it, made significant progress during the Hackathon. The app added seven more CMS identifiers and will soon be ready for testing on control panels. The app focuses on CMS and e-commerce applications but will also have an extendable mechanism allowing hosting providers to customize it to suit their needs.

CloudFest 2023 added a new WordPress Day, dedicated to helping internet infrastructure professionals learn more about WordPress’s footprint and ecosystem, and hear from some of the top WordPress plugin developers and security experts. The event was held earlier today on March 20, and featured 12 sessions on WordPress.