WordPress for the first time offers a private workspace that runs in your browser via a new service, my.WordPress.net

WordPress’ publishing software can now run entirely in a web browser, the organization behind the open source publishing software announced Wednesday. Through a new service called my.WordPress.net, WordPress allows users to set up a site and start publishing without signing up, setting up a hosting plan, or registering a domain. Instead, the new solution leverages the same technology that powers WordPress demos and makes it available as a permanent personal publishing platform.

There’s a big caveat to running WordPress this way: sites set up on my.WordPress.net are private by default and cannot be accessed from the public internet.

“It is not optimized for traffic, discovery, or presentation, nor does it need to be,” explains a blog post introducing the new service. “Instead, WordPress becomes a personal environment where ideas can exist before they are ready to be shared, or where they may never be shared at all.”

Sites created through this service are linked to your web browser, with their data saved in your browser’s storage. This means that you cannot access the site from another device. But you can move your site to a dedicated WordPress host if you want to make it public.

This positions WordPress as a personal workspace for activities such as private writing, journaling, drafting, researching, learning, or creating tools for personal use. For the latter, my.WordPress.net comes with an App Catalog that offers a variety of built-in tools using WordPress plugins, including a personal CRM, a personal RSS reader, a bookmarking tool, an AI workspace, and more.

The post notes that my.WordPress.net is powered by WordPress Playground, an open source project that lets you install WordPress on any device with one click, and which also integrates with OpenAI and CLI implementations to create new widgets. As a result, you can use the AI ​​Assistant to edit my.WordPress.net, to do things like modify a plugin or create a new plugin.

You can also ask the Assistant about data stored in WordPress, which it remembers, allowing WordPress to become a personal knowledge base accessible by AI.

The service will take longer to start up the first time you use it, the publication warns and recommends that you should save backups regularly. Its storage starts at around 100MB, making it better for personal apps and smaller use cases.

If, at any time, you want to delete your current work, you can click the button to reset the site. Or you can set up new, temporary instances that reset themselves when you refresh the browser.

The launch of the service follows the formation of the WordPress AI team last year, which is focused on launching new AI products for the developer community. Commercial hosting platform WordPress.com also launched an AI-powered website builder last year that lets you design a site using an AI-powered chatbot-style interface.