Is there something like jsfiddle or codepen for wordpress?

Question

Starting to learn WordPress theme development and being used to show jsfiddle or codepen links illustrating the problem with static sites.

How is this done on wordpress.stackexchange.com please? Is there a way to show an issue with WordPress by also posting some sort of fiddle or codepen?

I see people posting portions of their code on here. Is there a way to actually also show a solution works on some sort of site that has a sandbox WordPress installation for exmaple?

What is the preferred way to post problems with WordPress theme development on here? Just a code snippet and assume the experts will understand the underlying issue?

Answer 1

Unfortunately to my knowledge there is no such service for WordPress. The volume and complexity of WP core is probably making it impractical to create and securely run one like it.

So questions here are indeed limited to posting relevant code.

Note that for best answers it is best to reduce code to a minimum reproducible example. Too little code won't reproduce the issue and too much code is hard to read and in many cases will just make issue harder to spot.

Answer 2

Cloud9 provides sandboxes for WordPress theme and plugin development (and also a lot of other services); public workspaces are available for free by the way.

It's easy to setup different workspaces to play with custom server environments and configurations; you can even connect Cloud9 to your local VM or Sauce Labs for cross-browser compatibility testing.

Nevertheless I would not recommend sharing these links; sharing development environments does not make much sense as the projects will develop or vanish over the time, which makes it very hard to maintain those links.

As Rarst suggests in his answer it's better to only share the important parts of your code to reproduce the problem. This way it's also more likely to get an answer and make the question itself more useful for other people.

Sharing your whole development environment is probably too subjective.