Playground has become a fantastic tool for running tests, demos, and checking how combinations of plugins or themes behave, and it now receives a major update that improves how it is used.
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Program transcript
Hello, I’m Alicia Ireland, and you’re listening to WPpodcast, bringing the weekly news from the WordPress Community.
In this episode, you’ll find the information from December 22, 2025 to to January 4, 2026.
The Performance team has published a year end summary reviewing technical priorities and key discussions around performance in core and new features. One of the central topics was the proposal to integrate the View Transitions plugin directly into WordPress 7.0, which would improve visual transitions in the admin and in themes that support it, while also considering compatibility controls for plugins and custom code. They also discussed improvements to speculative loading and caching, including adjustments to detect caching systems and reduce delays on link clicks in hosting environments with active caching.
In addition, the team addressed performance in the admin panel and the dashboard, identifying tickets to take advantage of preloads and new techniques such as Compression Dictionaries, which can reduce CSS downloads and improve load times when supported by browsers. Some guidance was also provided around planning for 2026, with the idea of using Trac tickets with milestones instead of a traditional roadmap, given the recent lower level of contributor activity, and exploring alignment of performance testing strategies with other teams such as Gutenberg.
The Playground team has implemented three user interface improvements to make the environment more intuitive and efficient to use. There is now a dedicated instance management panel, where sites can be launched from templates or projects can be uploaded, saved instances can be viewed, and work can be organized from a single place. An “Unsaved instance” alert has also been added to help prevent accidental loss of progress when closing or refreshing the browser tab.
In addition, a quick access menu has been introduced, integrated into the internal address bar, allowing one click jumps to key areas such as the dashboard, the Site Editor, post creation, or plugin and theme management. This significantly speeds up testing and development workflows in Playground. These updates respond directly to community feedback and aim to make Playground more practical as a sandbox for testing WordPress and sharing demos without local setup.
The Community team has announced that it is bringing back women centered events around International Women’s Day, following the positive response to the previous edition, where local communities organized meetups that empowered women and expanded their presence in the WordPress ecosystem. The initiative once again invites organizers around the world to plan events focused on women and people from gender minorities in tech, providing resources such as detailed guides, best practices, and support to help with planning, applications, and the execution of inclusive activities.
The importance of this initiative lies in fostering safe and supportive spaces where women can share experiences, build skills, connect with other professionals, and take on leadership roles within the WordPress community. By providing structure, incentives, and visibility for these events, the Community team aims to strengthen long term diversity and inclusion within the open source project, helping to close representation gaps at conferences, in local groups, and in active community roles.
And finally, this podcast is distributed under a Creative Commons license as a derivative version of the podcast in Spanish; you can find all the links for more information, and the podcast in other languages, at WPpodcast .org.
Thanks for listening, and until the next episode!
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