Quickly create and customize WordPress Playground blueprints for testing, staging, demos, and education
This plugin simplifies the process of creating WordPress Playground “blueprints” and specifying content that should be loaded into the Playground. You can experiment with design changes, such as block theme edits, and save them for use in future playground sessions or to implement them on your live website.
Jan. 2026 update: Some of these features were previously reserved for a “Pro” version but are now available for free. You’re welcome.
A Playground is like an instant local server or virtual server that runs WordPress in your web browser. No server or cloud service required, except to kick off the process of telling the Playground what themes, plugins, and content to load.
Use Quick Playground to:
- Test themes, plugins, and design options for your website or client websites. See how your current web content would look in a different theme, for example. Selectively implement design changes on your live website.
- Create demo environments for themes, plugins, and WordPress-based services that run in the Playground rather than any physical web server. Pages, posts, and other content can be created specifically for use in the Playground, not on your live website.
- Showcase themes and plugins that are not yet available in the WordPress.org repository, whether that’s because they are proprietary or under development and not yet published. Or include plugins and themes that are not yet on your live site, simply by adding their wordpress.org repository urls.
- Give random users admin-level access to a website, without the need to provision server space and without the risk of them misusing or breaking the site. Even if they vandalize the website, no one else will see the results of their mischief.
- Add “Playground Prompt” messages on specific posts, pages, or admin screens, guiding users through your demos.
- Add custom PHP code, which can include calls to WordPress and plugin functions.
- Add steps defined in JSON format (for example, from published examples).
- Examples below.
Quick Playground’s Advantages
The standard method of building custom WordPress Playground blueprints involves working with JSON files that define “steps” like loading and activating a plugin or changing settings. Quick Playground generates the JSON for you.
The standard method involves uploading any supporting files to a repository such as Github. Quick Playground organizes supporting files such as zip files of custom or beta plugins on your own server. When you rebuild a Playground blueprint, it automatically creates new zip files of local plugins.
The standard method is not brain surgery, but Quick Playground eliminates manual work, makes Playground blueprints easier to update, and allows Playgrounds to update automatically based on content from your live website. For example, you can configure your Playground to always include your 10 latest blog posts.
There is at least one plugin available that allows you to quickly create a WordPress Playground instance based on your live website, but I found it didn’t work very well on multisite or on large websites that included hundreds of pages or posts.
Because by default it captures a sampling of “key content” — pages and posts with links from your home page and navigation, plus necessary attachments and block templates, along with pages and posts you choose — Quick Playground doesn’t get bogged down with trying to copy your entire database.
The same principle applies to plugins — no need to copy them all, just enough to make the Playground website display and work properly. That also reduces the possibility that you will include plugins that don’t work well within the Playground environment.
Save and Sync Features
You can save content, design, and settings changes back to the website you launched the playground from. By default, this content is stored in JSON files, rather than the WordPress database, so you can continue your work in future playground sessions.
With administrator approvals, changes such as tweaks to a block theme header or the content of the home page, these changes can be implemented on the live website.
How You Can Use Quick Playground
This is a plugin I created because I needed it for my own projects — but also thought it was worth investing in making it useful to others. Here are a couple of early examples of how I’m using it.
Example 1
This Playground shows how Swank Specialty Produce used my RSVPMaker plugin to promote and take reservations for their Swank Table series of gourmet dinners. The Playground features past events, displayed as if they were still upcoming. Because you enter the Playground as an administrator, you can also see examples of the fictionalized RSVP reservations.
Click the Go to Playground button to see it in a separate window. An embedded version appears below.
More recently, I created a separate Playground to allow event organizers to review draft posts for the new season before we were ready to make them public.
Example 2
On Toastmost, a website hosting service for Toastmasters clubs and districts, I’m using the Playground Design Gallery to allow website owners to see how their site would look in any one of several Toastmasters-branded themes. The service is hosted on WordPress multisite, meaning all site owners have access to a common library of approved themes.
For example, here is the same demo website in a theme with a menu that sticks to the top of the page and another with the menu on a sidebar rather than at the top.
I can imagine a franchise organization offering franchisees a limited number of approved designs they can test the same way.
What Quick Playground Simplifies
The standard method of creating a Playground involves coding a JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) blueprint or specification and uploading the blueprint and any other required files to a service like Github.
With Quick Playground, you create and host the blueprint and any supporting files (such as zip files of non-public themes and plugins) on your own server. You can upgrade your themes, plugins, and blueprints at will through the Quick Playground Blueprint Builder.
I have experimented with a similar plugin, Sandbox Site powered by Playground and found it didn’t work well with WordPress multisite or with large sites that include hundreds or thousands of blog posts. My understanding is that plugin tries to copy the entire website, whereas Quick Playground takes a more selective approach.
By default, it identifies your site’s “key pages and posts” — the home page and local link from the home page or the menu. You can specify other pages that should be included in the Playground, including draft pages and posts to be included as live content on the Playground site.
Developer Friendly
Theme and plugin developers can take advantage of multiple filter and action hooks to make Quick Playground work better with custom post types or custom database tables. Documentation is still on my todo list, but you can look at this example of integration with my own RSVPMaker event scheduling plugin.
Feedback
I welcome your feedback on improvements to Quick Playground. Write to [email protected]
Source code: https://github.com/davidfcarr/quick-playground