I have been playing with the WordPress Playground a lot. As I did, I wanted a way to quickly make a copy of an existing site to a new Playground. It seems an ideal way to test new plugins, themes, and other things you’d want to change.
You do that by making a Blueprint with all the data for the site you want to mimic. So, I started working on a Blueprint Builder. It’s far from done and shouldn’t be run on a live site yet. But it has all the concepts of something that could be very useful. It makes a blueprint of the current site’s plugins, themes, and options. It even makes a WXR URL available through the REST API to download a site’s content into your Playground.
If your site is relatively simple, it works (if I haven’t just broken it with my last commit). If you have a custom theme, it doesn’t play nicely yet, because it doesn’t download that (yet). It also ignores any plugins it doesn’t recognize from WordPress.org.
I told Adam Zielinski about it (he created Playground). He asked me to open-source it, as it could perhaps be used within the project. Similar ideas existed there as well, which I think is exciting. So I did, and the code is now available to all.
