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 browse...

New management panel for Playground