Seems like a great way to test plugins and themes in a clean environment. Premium themes could use this as their demo too instead of having to keep a demo Wordpress running.

If it's call client side couldn't someone just take the theme and not actually pay for it?

Then you don't get updates/fixes. And may need to edit the code after acquiring it, to stop license checks. And you'll need to go to the effort of extracting the relevant files from the environment in the browser.

Overall... yeah, sure, maybe, but anyone with any amount of money in their budget for this at all is just gonna pay instead of dealing with that.

Sure and you’d be open to liabilities but this is also relevant

https://developer.wordpress.org/themes/getting-started/wordp...

Wordpress operates a plugin & theme marketplace. This could be very nice as a way to demo those products without adding meaningful infrastructure development and operational expenses.

[EDIT]: Very nice for WP/Automattic and the people who develop plugins to sell on that marketplace, that is.

The infra cost can be very tiny tho. Digital ocean has 1 click installers for WordPress, which you can use for a few hours and then shutdown and only pay a few pennies.

Now you have to build or configure a system for spinning those up and down at the command of anonymous visitors to your website. Or eat the cost of running a whole bunch of them all the time. And test that system. And monitor it. And secure it (and no matter how well you do that, you're now exposed to a wider set of risks than you were if you hadn't built this thing). And do maintenance development as dumb crap happens under & around you ("fucking [vendor] API broke on us again, with what was allegedly just a bugfix update, that they rolled out at local midnight on a Saturday without warning..."). And have another thing to look at & talk about in budgeting discussions and spending audits.

Yes, of course you can do it, and the cost of running it may be low, but the cost of bandwidth transfer to send the files to browsers so they can run these instead is probably a lot lower, and saves 100%[1] of that initial and ongoing development & operational spending. There's a largish complexity cost to the whole thing, that's all but completely absent if you run it in the browser instead.

The raw cost of running ephemeral VMs isn't the meat of the expenses I meant.

[1, edit] OK, not 100% exactly because they did have to develop this thing the link is about, but that's also a thing that can be used for other stuff, too, not just yet another way to press a button and spin up a cheap VM running Wordpress—this is a unique product, potentially, with many uses, one application of which happens to be filling the role of providing live demos in Automattic's theme/plugin marketplace.

I wasn't suggesting WP does it, just provides the CLI commands or instructions to do it.

The WASM solution is cool but I'm still skeptical that there aren't quirks and incompatibilities in there.

It could be pretty handy for WP training...fresh environment with whatever setup you want, separate for each trainee.

There have been other solutions to run Wordpress locally or hosted without having to setup PHP and MySQL; this appears to be the first such first-party tool for doing so.