What's new for developers? (August 2025)

[justintadlock]

This is a rolling discussion for a monthly series that is intended to keep track of the items, PRs, Trac tickets, and Make blog posts that are interesting/important for developers. The goal is to publish a post on the 10th of each month with the previous month's updates.

Everyone is welcome to contribute to this monthly document. If you find something interesting, just create a new reply to this discussion below.

Google Doc: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1QIPa5w6tX5SO3xKZi_cgdmwFGccl90EPASfkGjaRJ4A/edit?usp=sharing

[github-actions]

Heads-up @bph @adamziel @bgrgicak @jonathanbossenger @alexapeduzzi @fellyph: To include your project's news for developers, please add the information or a link as a comment to this issue. Deadline 8th of next month

[bph]

In GitHub Overview issues, @mtias and @youknowriad outline the concepts and details on upcoming Admin Redesign work:

• Admin Materials and Surfaces,
• Abilities & Workflows Overview,
• Admin Redesign: A solid routing foundation,

[adamziel]

@fellyph let's share what's new in Playground :)

[rodrigoprimo]

WordPress Coding Standards 3.2.0: https://github.com/WordPress/WordPress-Coding-Standards/releases/tag/3.2.0

[fellyph]

At the Playground project, we implemented several performance improvements, including OPCache, and supported multiple Workers. On error handling, we included better messaging on PHP error logging and error reporting with the CLI, improving some flows by rejecting unrecognized options. At playground.wordpress.net, and the CLI, PHP 8.3 is the new default version.

About the Xdebug support, it is already available as an experimental feature with a lot of cool integrations, bridging DBGP sessions with CDP servers, and enabling Xdebug via CLI flags. Another important experimental feature is that Blueprints V2 is available via a flag.

Finishing with the documentation, more content has been translated into other languages, and now the documentation has content in Filipino, together with Gujarati, Spanish, Portuguese, and Japanese. A new page explaining how to use the new Playground CLI was added to the documentation.

Lists

General updates

• Added support to query monitor in the SQLite integration plugin #2415
• Added OPCache support #2400
• Makes PHP 8.3 the default version for playground.wordpress.net and Playground CLI. #2371
• Support multiple workers for NODEFS /wordpress mounts – Asyncify #2317
• Use CORS proxy in embedded Playgrounds #2369
• Improve error logging #2357

Adding experimental support to Xdebug

• Bridge DBGP session with CDP server with Xdebug #2402
• Introduces an --experimental-devtools option in the Playground CLI to start the Xdebug-to-CDP bridge process. #2411.
• Add --xdebug option in php-wasm CLI and wp-playground CLI #2346.

Playground CLI

• Add --internal-cookie-store option for Playground CLI #2323: Some workflows need Playground to own cookie persistence, e.g., VS Code webview does not store cookies, so any Blueprint with autologin enabled results in an infinite redirection loop.
• Improve error reporting #2401: Stop printing the stack trace if the --debug flag isn't set and reject unrecognized options.
• Expose Blueprints v2 runner in Playground CLI: Adds Blueprints v2 support to Playground CLI via the --experimental-blueprints-v2-runner flag. #2394

Documentation

• Added a new page about the playground CLI #2337, updated Playground Web instance page #2365, and new video content related to Playground in Polish, Spanish, Japanese, and English was added to the resources page. #2348.
• Translations: 39 new pages of the documentation have been translated into four languages: Gujarati, Spanish, Japanese, Filipino, and Portuguese. #2448, #2343, #2358, #2391, #2340, #2352, #2386, #2434, #2438, #2431, #2351, #2450, and another 15 translated pages were updated.

cc @adamziel

[jonathanbossenger]

I think it would be good to highlight that the Core AI team published their AI Building Blocks for WordPress post, briefly mention the four projects, their GitHub repositories, and that interested parties can join the #core-ai Slack channel

[justintadlock]

Thanks, everyone, for the help putting the list together this month!

This one's ready for review: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1QIPa5w6tX5SO3xKZi_cgdmwFGccl90EPASfkGjaRJ4A/edit?usp=sharing