adamziel

I’ve been at Automattic since 2018. Reading this thread, I wanted to share a story.

In 2022, Matt supported me and my work on WordPress Playground [1]. Playground was in its early days and most people were still questioning whether it did anything useful. I got skepticism from peers, social media, even from my direct lead at the time. Not from Matt. He encouraged me, promoted Playground, created an environment where I could build a team around it, and encouraged us to always open-source more and more for the community. Since then, Playground has matured, grown in popularity, and sparked other great open-source work [2][3][4][5]. Now it’s 2026, and Playground helps a lot of people every day.

And that wouldn’t have happened without Matt.

No company is perfect. I’m just grateful to be part of one that values open-source so, so much. Automattic has been around 21 years now. It must have spent dozens or hundreds of millions of dollars on building free, open source software! And everything have changed so much during those 21 years: The industry, the VC landscape, the prices of hardware. Every incentive to go closed-source is there, and yet Automattic is still doubling down on open-source. I think that’s pretty amazing, and I’m grateful to Matt for staying true to those values.

Anyway, that's the story. Take care of yourselves, everyone!

[1] https://wordpress.org/playground/ [2] https://wordpress.com/studio/ [3] https://github.com/WordPress/sqlite-database-integration [4] https://github.com/WordPress/php-toolkit/ [5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49378305

Ooops! Would you file an issue on GitHub? This would really help us track it and fix it.

Or add `?mode=seamless` to the URL:

https://playground.wordpress.net/?mode=seamless

See https://wordpress.github.io/wordpress-playground/query-api/ for more cool options!

Note WordPress has an official WebAssembly build for the browser and Node.js: https://developer.wordpress.org/playground https://github.com/WordPress/wordpress-playground

Disclosure: I'm the creator

This project is different in that it builds PHP to WASI.

Docker works on the server, WASM WordPress works in the browser. The innovation is that you don't need a backend.

Author here, it is super encouraging to see this trending on HN, thank you for the great discussion, links, and ideas!

I hope to change how learning, using, and contributing to WordPress looks like. This writeup explores how WASM WordPress works and why it's useful:

https://make.wordpress.org/core/2022/09/23/client-side-webas...

Here's a few possible applications: try a theme without affecting your current website, have live themes and plugins demos right in the directory, enable first contributions directly on wordpress.org without any setup steps, learn WordPress in the browser, or replay and debug failed tests right in the CI.

Technically most of these things are possible today with a specialized backend. The problem is that it's either expensive and time-consuming to maintain, like a fleet of custom WP instances, or limited, like iframing a preconfigured 3rd party solution. WASM-based solution is open-source, cheap to run, and doesn't seem to have deal-breaking limitations.

I wouldn't run production websites on this just yet, as it sometimes crashes in Chrome and the bundle size is 50MB+, but both problems can be solved. Once they are, this will be so much more than just a cool tech demo.

Author here, here's an in-depth writeup on how this works and why it's useful:

https://make.wordpress.org/core/2022/09/23/client-side-webas...

To answer your questions directly:

WebAssembly is the magic sauce that transforms server-side code into client-side code. MySQL unfortunately is not yet supported by WebAssembly, so I applied a plugin that adds SQLite supports to WordPress [0]. The WebAssembly application has its own in-memory filesystem that lives in a specific browser tab and is scraped as soon as you close it.

So – technically it exposes db credentials, and even the entire DB, but that you are the only user of that DB so it's okay.

> What would the backend look like

The only backend is a static file server where the code and the database live. Your browser downloads a copy of the database and allows you to modify it in the current tab, but the updates are never saved back to the server.

[0] https://github.com/aaemnnosttv/wp-sqlite-db

Thank you for sharing! I just created an issue: https://github.com/adamziel/wordpress-wasm/issues/19

I already did!

https://adamziel.github.io/index.html

https://adamziel.github.io/tutorial.html

It also lives on netlify: https://fanciful-gnome-a4edc4.netlify.app/