Today we talked about two relatively new tools from Automattic that make it possible to experiment with WordPress, build small plugins, and test them — all without installing anything on a server, and without writing code in the traditional sense.
WordPress Playground
WordPress Playground (playground.wordpress.net) is a complete WordPress installation that runs entirely inside your web browser. There is no host, no database to set up, no FTP, and no local development environment to install. Just open the URL and you have a working admin within a few seconds.
It exists those who want to:
- Test a plugin, you needed a staging site or a local environment.
- Want to demonstrate something to a client, without setting up hosting for a demo.
Telex
Telex (telex.automattic.ai) is an experimental tool from Automattic that turns a written description into a working WordPress block.
You type what you want the block to do, you press Build, and a few seconds later you have a functioning Gutenberg block you can use, modify, or extract.
During the meetup, I demonstrated five blocks built with Telex. They are listed below with brief descriptions. If you want to play with any of them yourself, the Telex project showcase makes most of these forkable.
- Dino Runner Game Block — an endless side-scrolling jump game in the style of the Chrome offline T-Rex page. Demonstrates that Telex can handle real-time animation, collision detection, and game state inside a block.
- Hangman Game Block — the classic word-guessing game. Demonstrates state, input handling, and win/lose logic. A useful proof that if Telex can build a game, it can comfortably build the smaller utilities most sites actually need.
- Business Hours Status Block — displays “Open Now — closes at 6pm” with a coloured indicator dot, calculated automatically from per-day hours set in the block sidebar. The kind of thing every local business website asks for.
- Testimonial Carousel — a horizontal slider for client testimonials with star ratings, configurable cards-per-view, and autoplay. Built with vanilla JavaScript rather than the heavy carousel libraries most existing plugins reach for.
- Timeline Milestone Block — vertical or horizontal timeline of dated milestones, with optional images per entry. Suited to About pages, company history, or any narrative that benefits from a visual sequence.
What Telex is good at, and where it stops
Telex is genuinely impressive when you ask it for a self-contained block with internal state and a clear visual specification. The five examples above all came together in roughly the time it takes to write the prompt, plus a few seconds of generation.
I personally think its a great tool to use to “AI vibe” plugins and blocks that you need for your projects. As well as customizable blocks your clients can use for their business goals.
I developed a Endurance Sports Block with Telex which you can view here:
Which is also accessible on github here:
Getting a Telex-built plugin into the WordPress.org repository
I met Jeff Paul earlier this year at WordCamp Canada in Ottawa, where he tried to give a session demonstrating Telex. That was the first I had heard of it, even though it wasn’t working then, but it was the reason I started experimenting with the tool when I got back to Chiang Mai.
A few weeks later, I had built the Endurance Sports Block, published it on my personal site, and pushed the code to GitHub. I shared the project with Jeff to show him what I had made. He replied with a pull request that adds the infrastructure required to publish a plugin to the WordPress.org repository, along with notes on what to do next.
The PR adds two files. The first is the 10up/action-wordpress-plugin-deploy workflow file, which describes how the plugin gets built and deployed. The second is a .gitattributes file, which controls what is included in the deployment package and what is left out.
To use it, you add repository (or organisation) secrets for SVN_USERNAME and SVN_PASSWORD, which connect the workflow to your SVN account on WordPress.org. Two specific things to get right:
Capitalisation of the username matters. The WordPress.org documentation on Subversion accounts covers the exact rules.
The SVN password is not the same as your WordPress.org login password. WordPress made security changes to plugin and theme author accounts in 2024 that introduced separate SVN credentials. If your deployment fails on authentication, this is almost always the reason.