The login status for https://playground.wordpress.net/ will automatically expire within a few minutes.

[easychen]

Our website generation WordPress plugin embeds playground.wordpress.net using an iframe. It used to work well, but in the past few hours, we noticed that the logged-in WordPress backend expires quickly within a few minutes.

It seems to be triggered by https://playground.wordpress.net/scope:0xxx/wp-admin/admin-ajax.php returning {"wp-auth-check"
,"server_time":1720617452}.

You can try and see it by visiting this URL: https://wp.budcoder.com/t/uLmg9KetdcazaZbuyPJt8o/4, and then wait for 1 or 2 minutes.

How should we fix this issue?

[danielmilner]

I noticed this happening when launched from the official "Preview" button in the Plugin Directory as well. The login will expire within a few seconds or if I attempt to navigate to a page other than the one initially loaded.

[bgrgicak]

This might be unrelated, but when I visit Playground the admin bar is visible, but after clicking on it, I need to login.

Screen.Recording.2024-07-11.at.07.23.27.mov

[bgrgicak]

When I go to https://playground.wordpress.net/, click on the Dashboard link, and login I stay logged in.
When I go to https://playground.wordpress.net/?url=/wp-admin/ it opens the dashboard automatically, but I get logged out within seconds.

It looks like there is an issue with the login step.

When we get to work on it, let's update the step to work similarly to the Sandbox plugin. This approach allows us to login users without a password.

[bgrgicak]

Related to the issue if we install a plugin or theme using the Query API and browse Playground, the theme/plugin get's deactivated.

Example:

• Open this URL https://playground.wordpress.net/?theme=abletone&networking=yes
• See the theme was installed
• Go to /wp-admin/
• Login
• Go back to /
• See that it switched to the default theme

[bgrgicak]

This is fixed now. It was caused by #1532.

The PR is backfilling static assets from a zip. The ZIP also included the default DB dumb which meant that after backfilling the database would be restarted to the default state.