WordPress Museum

Three interactive views of WordPress release history:

• Desktop — releases as shortcuts in an early-2000s desktop.
• Winamp — releases as tracks in a music-player timeline.
• Kubrick — releases as posts in a classic WordPress weblog.

Structure

.
├── index.html                 # Static preview index; not the production landing page.
├── desktop/index.html
├── winamp/index.html
├── kubrick/index.html
├── data/releases.js           # Shared release history.
├── assets/fonts/              # Locally served fonts and their licenses.
├── museum.php                 # Thin WordPress routing adapter.
└── scripts/check-static.mjs   # Dependency-free repository checks.

The experiences are ordinary HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. There is no frontend build step. The files committed to the repository are the files the browser runs.

That is deliberate. These experiences have no server state and no need for a framework or bundler. Add a build step only when source files genuinely need compilation or optimization. Keep generated output out of the design until then.

Local preview

npm start

Open http://127.0.0.1:4173/. Run the checks with:

npm run check
php -l museum.php

Opening an individual HTML file directly also works.

wordpress.org deployment

https://wordpress.org/museum/ is already a separate WordPress site. Its landing page should remain normal WordPress content so editors can change the introduction and navigation without shipping code.

The full-screen experiences should not be pasted into Custom HTML blocks. They own the entire viewport, and their styles and scripts should not share a page with a WordPress theme. GitHub Pages is useful for previews, but it cannot claim only the /museum path on wordpress.org.

museum.php provides the small integration layer:

URL	File
/museum/desktop/	desktop/index.html
/museum/winamp/	winamp/index.html
/museum/kubrick/	kubrick/index.html

It also serves the shared release data and local fonts at stable same-origin URLs. The route map is explicit; a newly committed file is not public until its route is reviewed.

Production still needs one infrastructure step: coordinate with the WordPress Meta team to sync this repository as the wporg-museum plugin and activate it only on the Museum site. Activation installs the rewrite rules. Do not add an automatic production deployment workflow until that server-side contract is confirmed.

The root index.html is only a portable preview for local servers or GitHub Pages. WordPress continues to render the production /museum/ landing page.

Adding an experience

1. Add a directory containing an index.html entry point.
2. Keep its assets inside that directory, or use an existing shared asset.
3. Add its public route to assets() in museum.php.
4. Add it to the preview index.
5. Run the checks and test keyboard, narrow-screen, and reduced-motion behavior.

Origins and licenses

See CREDITS.md. Repository code is licensed under GPL-2.0. The bundled fonts retain their own SIL Open Font License files.