Glacial Hills Scenic Byway

Today, Dean and I went on his least adventurous ride and my first motorcycle tour ever: riding down Kansas’ Glacial Hills Scenic Byway.

There were a few sections that challenged me, all of them involved negotiating curves with strong sidewinds at (to me) high speeds, on some of the Interstate parts, and particularly between Atchison and Leavenworth. But I’ll remember it for the gorgeous runs alongside the Missouri River: northbound on the Missouri side through crisp morning air, and southbound on K-7 through rural Kansas.

I had great time and I’m looking forward to exploring a few more of these!

Plugin Check with Playground CLI

While working on the WordPress.org MCP server (yes, WordPress.org now accepts plugin submissions directly from your you AI assistant), I wanted to make it easy for AI agents to run plugins against Plugin Check before trying to submit a plugin to the Plugin Directory for review.

The best Claude could come up with was a convoluted prompt, explaining how to set up wp-env, set up Plugin Check, and run it locally. It was long, required a lot of steps, and gave ample opportunity for AI agents to get stuck or confused and give up.

While participating in Automattic’s AI Enablement training in New York, I managed to come up with a much easier way with the help of WordPress Playground (Thank you Adam and Bero for you help)! Turns out it supports running inline CLI commands now, albeit still requiring a blueprint.json file.

The whole command can now be condensed down to:

Create blueprint.json

{ "steps": [ {"step": "installPlugin", "pluginData": {"resource": "wordpress.org/plugins", "slug": "plugin-check"}}, {"step": "wp-cli", "command": "wp plugin activate plugin-check my-plugin"}, {"step": "cp", "fromPath": "/wordpress/wp-content/plugins/plugin-check/drop-ins/object-cache.copy.php", "toPath": "/wordpress/wp-content/object-cache.php"} ] }

Run the check

npx @wp-playground/cli php \ --blueprint=blueprint.json \ --mount=/path/to/my-plugin:/wordpress/wp-content/plugins/my-plugin \ --quiet \ -- /tmp/wp-cli.phar plugin check my-plugin \ --categories=plugin_repo --format=json \ --error-severity=7 --warning-severity=6 \ --include-low-severity-errors --exclude-checks=prefixing

If it accepted an inline json blob as a blueprint, it could even be a one-liner! Albeit a very long one.

Pretty cool what’s possible with WordPress Playground these days. And if you’ve not had a chance to check out WordPress.org’s MCP yet, take it for a spin! Let me know what you think.

#AI #WordPress

Using the MCP Server #WordPress #WPDevDocs https://developer.wordpress.org/plugins/wordpress-org/using-the-mcp-server/?utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=fedica-DevDocs

8.0.0 — Smash That Like Button

WordPress ActivityPub 8.0.0 makes your blog more interactive in the Fediverse: visitors can Like/Boost posts directly on-site, with faster repeat interactions and clearer guidance. New Fediverse block patterns/templates speed setup, a pre-publish panel suggests post formats, community snippets land in-repo, and remote media caching is rebuilt for reliability. PHP 7.4+ required.

https://activitypub.blog/2026/03/05/8-0-0-smash-that-like-button/

Indian Creek Trail Ride

https://youtu.be/M5cMd8Mm8lI

First ride with the Action 5. I still have a lot of kinks to work out, including wind noises, random cut outs, settings, etc. But I think this was a good start. Ironically, this was the ride with the most unexpected things happening, including our first flat in two years of riding, and I ended up turning off the camera during arguably the most interesting part.

We rode most of the Indian Creek Trail in Overland Park, stopping for a beer and a snack at half way. It was the first sustained stretch of warm weather for the year and a great first ride for the season. Looking forward to many more!