Support Default Content/Options

[bengreeley]

In anticipation of using WordPress Playground for the preview functionality of the theme or plugin directories, I'd like to see if being able to provide default content to the playground is feasible.

Many themes require specific pages or options to be set in order to render correctly. It would be ideal if theme providers could provide a file that is imported when WordPress Playground launches the theme. We'd need to think through some guidelines as far as what content is acceptable and document the process of how the content/options are created and exported, but that can be worked on when we are working on the theme/plugin directories.

[dd32]

It would be ideal if theme providers could provide a file that is imported when WordPress Playground launches the theme.

Without sounding like a squeaky wheel, Starter Content is a perfect example of the starting point for that, perhaps with additional pre-defined options.

[bengreeley]

Squeak on!

Maybe that's where we should start the explorations - if we can define the starter content through a script that WordPress Playground executes on launch for a theme, it could add the content that way and reuse the existing customizer experience. That could limit the data that is imported to only the wp_options table, right?

I do wonder if the Customizer approach for previewing themes would be needed in the future if we switched the interface to use WP Playground.

[adamziel]

+1 to that!

Note that .data bundles can already be switched on demand (e.g. via ?wp=6.1 or ?wp=6.0). You can already prepare a custom content bundle by starting a site, migrating it to sqlite, customizing the content, and packaging it up as a .data bundle (inspect the build:wp:6.1 npm script to see how).

That's quite some work, so it would be amazing to make it as easy as customizing a playground and exporting it or even exporting just the delta – @artemiomorales is exploring the import and export logic.

If there was a WordPress-specific starter content format that could be plugged in seamlessly via a query parameter, perhaps from some wp.org starter content directory, that would be fantastic too.

[eliot-akira]

Just wanted to comment on the similarity I noticed with wp-env, a tool that wraps Docker to easily create new instances of WordPress. It has a configuration format to define the WP core version, list of pre-installed plugins/themes, etc.

There's a feature request where they discuss adding a way to import content on startup: wp-env: Add a config option for content import. To quote the example:

{
	"core": "WordPress/WordPress#5.2.0",
	"plugins": [ "WordPress/wp-lazy-loading", "WordPress/classic-editor" ],
	"themes": [ "WordPress/theme-experiments" ],
        "import": [
              "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/WPTT/theme-unit-test/master/themeunittestdata.wordpress.xml"
        ]
}

It maps closely to what the Playground accepts as URL query variables, and it seems there could be a shared standard like Dockerfile or devcontainer.json, as a declarative format to define and configure WordPress environments. Well, maybe not necessarily "declarative", some use cases may require a script to prepare site settings, refresh permalinks, etc. Even that, I imagine there are common needs between the Playground and wp-env, one spinning up customized WordPress instances on WASM, and the other on Docker.

If there was a WordPress-specific starter content format that could be plugged in seamlessly via a query parameter, perhaps from some wp.org starter content directory, that would be fantastic too.

The wp-env feature proposal uses wxr format which fits the description. Not sure how suitable that would be for the Playground, but whatever the format, it sounds useful to be able to import starter/demo content from an external URL.

Or even fetch site environment configuration files from a URL. Then there could be a directory of "site starter images", which wp-env and Playground could download from, like Docker Hub.

[adamziel]

I'd love to eventually have a declarative format! I don't see an easy way to get there, though, so it might take some iterations. wxr only contains limited data. There's no site options, user accounts, or media files. The wxz format can support any data, but it would take a lot of work to make it work with, e.g., new database tables created by plugins.

The most sensible first version I can think of is a custom .phar file:

<?php 

require "/wordpress/wp-load.php";
require "/root/started-content.phar";

Phars can contain media and wxr files. They can also perform any logic – as simple as importing content from an XML file, or as complex as importing a thousand WooCommerce products with variations. They're not declarative, may feel a bit clunky, but they at least enable developers to do anything.

cc @bengreeley

[adamziel]

Solved by adding Blueprints in #211, see https://wordpress.github.io/wordpress-playground/docs/blueprints-api/index for usage examples