What is Studio by WordPress.com? It’s a way to do local development with WordPress without the use of additional third party apps.

Designed to empower developers, designers, and site builders, Studio offers a seamless solution for creating and running WordPress sites directly on your local machine, as well as showcasing work-in-progress sites with your clients, teams, and colleagues.

WordPress.com Blog

According to the developer blog on WordPress.com, the features include:

• Demo sites: Forget Ngrok-like tunnels—share interactive snapshots of your local sites with clients or colleagues, powered by WordPress.com.
• Superfast WordPress installation: Regardless of how many sites you’re working on, you can create unlimited local sites in Studio.
• Dependency-free building: Build lightweight and reliable local WordPress sites, powered by WordPress Playground, without the hassle of Docker, NGINX, Apache, or MySQL.
• One-click admin: Spend less time wrangling passwords—open WP Admin for each site with just one click.
• Open your site anywhere: Develop your sites your way. Open your site’s code in your favorite IDE, CLI, or file browser to fit your workflow.
• Built by the biggest contributor to WordPress core: With 109 active contributors, we know WordPress inside and out.

Comments about Studio on Post Status Slack included:

• It being a Playground under the hood makes me a bit skeptical it’ll actually be suited for a lot of plugin development.
• I’m wondering about the data export options. Particularly for those who aren’t using .com to host.
• No way to switch PHP version and no support for https:// or switching domains/port at least from what I can see.
• It’s very early, but I like the direction.

I downloaded Studio for a test spinIf you know me, you know I’m not a developer, but I was curious to see how quickly it spun up a local site, especially for someone who has struggled with third party tools in the past.

I can say that it was super fast, including downloading and installing it on my Macbook. Then with the click of a button I had a brand new WordPress install open in a browser tab.

One of the things I noted that seems useful is the ability to share the link to others (nice if you’re developing locally and want to share with a client). You do have to be logged into your WordPress.com account to access this feature.

I’ll play with it a bit more and update this post if I find anything unexpected, but from a first glance it’s behaving just like any other WordPress install.

FeedbackHave you tried it yet? Do you have feedback? Questions? Contact us or comment below and we’ll see what we can find for you.

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Resources* Meet Studio: Your New Favorite Way to Develop WordPress Locally * Build Fast, Ship Faster with Studio

This article, Studio by WordPress.com Launched Today, was published at Post Status — the community for WordPress professionals.