This is the home of the Make Community team for the WordPress open sourceOpen SourceOpen Source denotes software for which the original source code is made freely available and may be redistributed and modified. Open Source **must be** delivered via a licensing model, see GPL. project!
Here is where we have policy debates, project announcements, and assist community members in organizing events.
Everyone is welcome to comment on posts and participate in the discussions regardless of skill level or experience.
Get Involved
If you love WordPress and want to help us do these things, join in!
This is the first post in MeetupMeetupMeetup groups are locally-organized groups that get together for face-to-face events on a regular basis (commonly once a month). Learn more about Meetups in our Meetup Organizer Handbook. Formats That Work, a series highlighting WordPress meetup groups that have experimented with new session formats, and what other organizers can learn from them. See the call for stories at the end of this post.
One of our big goals for 2026 is to help meetupsMeetupMeetup groups are locally-organized groups that get together for face-to-face events on a regular basis (commonly once a month). Learn more about Meetups in our Meetup Organizer Handbook. evolve beyond the traditional speaker-led session: adding more hands-on learning, active participation, and clearer pathways into contribution. That vision is already happening in communities around the world.
WordPress Nairobi is one of them.
About the group
WordPress Nairobi has been active since around 2016, when the community began forming ahead of the first WordCampWordCampWordCamps are casual, locally-organized conferences covering everything related to WordPress. They're one of the places where the WordPress community comes together to teach one another what they’ve learned throughout the year and share the joy. Learn more. Nairobi. They aim to meet at least once a month, and consistency has been central to their growth, especially after a difficult period during and after COVID, when attendance sometimes dropped to 10 people or fewer. Their most recent workshop brought in 41 attendees, and they’ve seen sessions with over 60.
That turnaround didn’t happen by accident. It happened because the organizers listened to their community and were willing to change how they run things.
The shift: from speaker sessions to workshops
The traditional speaker format was starting to feel repetitive. Attendance fluctuated, and participants expressed a desire for more interactive sessions. So WordPress Nairobi started experimenting.
Their UIUIUI is an acronym for User Interface - the layout of the page the user interacts with. Think ‘how are they doing that’ and less about what they are doing./UXUXUX is an acronym for User Experience - the way the user uses the UI. Think ‘what they are doing’ and less about how they do it. Mastery Workshop is a clear example of what that looks like in practice:
The session opened with a short presentation on WordPress design to set the foundation
Attendees were divided into four groups, each with at least one organizer embedded to support participants, especially beginners
Each group worked on a pre-prepared website with intentional design issues, tackling one specific area: typography, mobile responsiveness, call-to-actions, or visual hierarchy
Groups then presented their solutions, followed by a Q&A
The session closed with open networking time
Total attendees: 41. Energy level: noticeably higher than a typical speaker session.
“What stood out most was how naturally participants collaborated. Even beginners felt comfortable contributing, and the group setting encouraged discussion, problem-solving, and peer learning.” — Jesse, WordPress Nairobi organizer
What it took to prepare
Workshops require more preparation than regular meetups. For this one, the team needed:
A pre-designed website with intentional design flaws built in
Clear problem statements for each group
Coordination among organizers to know who was supporting which group
A structured event flow, from introduction to wrap-up
More intentional thinking about group composition and time management
One thing that helped: refreshments. Not always possible, but even occasional coffee and snacks made participants feel more comfortable and welcome.
What didn’t go as planned
Some groups moved faster than others, and a few participants needed more guidance than expected. Having organizers inside each group (rather than floating) made the difference. They could adapt in real time and make sure every group reached the finish line.
The lesson: flexibility during the session matters as much as preparation beforehand.
Beyond workshops: a broader format experiment
WordPress Nairobi hasn’t stopped at workshops. They’re also experimenting with:
Themed meetups: eCommerce-focused sessions, beginners-only sessions, design-focused sessions, targeting specific needs rather than trying to serve everyone at once
Outdoor community events: including a community hike at Karura Forest, which created space for organic networking in a relaxed setting (with another one planned for May, this time contributing photos to the WordPress Photo Directory)
The insight behind the themed approach is simple: people engage more when a session is directly relevant to them. Instead of general topics, focused formats improve both engagement and retention.
What you can take from this
If you’re thinking about running a hands-on session in your meetup, here’s what WordPress Nairobi would tell you:
Listen to your community first. Format changes work best when they respond to real feedback.
Embed organizers in groups, don’t just float. Mixed skill levels need active support, not just availability.
Prepare the materials, then stay flexible. The pre-built website with intentional issues was essential, but so was the ability to adapt mid-session.
Start with a focused theme. Trying to serve everyone at once is harder than designing a session for a specific audience.
Small touches matter. Refreshments, a clear structure, a good wrap-up… these signal that the organizers care about the experience.
Share your story
Have you tried a format that went beyond the traditional speaker session? A workshop, a hackathon, a themed meetup, an outdoor event, a contribution sprint… we want to hear about it.
This series exists to give other organizers real examples, not just theory. If your meetup has something worth sharing, get in touch with us. We’ll reach out with a few short questions and take it from there.
The more formats we document, the easier it gets for every organizer to try something new!
Props to Jesse Mwangi @aquila20 for sharing their experience (and photos!) and making this post possible. Jesse is a web designer and digital marketer based in Nairobi who has been part of the WordPress world since 2016, organizing meetups, speaking at WordCamps, and contributing to translation efforts in Kiswahili. Head over to his profile to learn more about his contributions.
All projects and content in the WordPress project follow a set of guidelines to ensure standards. Some examples include the WordPress coding standards, the WordPress documentation guidelines, and the WordPress.tv guidelines. Hence, it’s time to start thinking about a basic set of guidelines for the Learn WordPress platform as well. The purpose behind having guidelines for Learn are two-fold:
To avoid any confusion amongst workshop creators on how to create videos.
To ensure that Learn WordPress videos have some form of uniformity and standards, instead of being radically different from each other.
Here are some ideas on those things about Learn that we can standardize.
Length of the workshop: A maximum of 90 minutes. Anything more than that could potentially be broken down into a series or multiple workshops.
Workshop title image format: We could potentially request workshop authors to create title cards similar to WordPress design standards. We can provide a sample title card with the necessary fonts and designs that creators can fork for their use.
Fonts/formatting for titles and overlays: Ask users to add content similar to the WordPress.orgWordPress.orgThe community site where WordPress code is created and shared by the users. This is where you can download the source code for WordPress core, plugins and themes as well as the central location for community conversations and organization. https://wordpress.org/ design language? We should be able to provide assets to help creators.
Slide format: If the presenter uses slides, can we provide them a slide format or a template that they can use? (in .key, .ppt or on Google slides format). The training team already has guidelines for slides, which we can potentially use for Learn. For workshops based on existing lesson plans, it would be useful to make use of existing slides, or to add new slides to lesson plans. We will also need guidelines on the storage and accessibility of slides.
Suggestions/recommendations on the structure of the workshop How should the organizers present their content? Should workshop organizers present slides along with the workshop? How should organizers switch from screencasts/slides? Here are some thoughts:
New presenters are encouraged to create workshops based on existing lesson plans, as they already contain objectives, assessments, and slides for Learn workshops.
Presenters should aim to make their videos as interactive as possible.
Add more Slides/writings/written-text on the video workshop.
Include screen shares if we’re talking about a technical topic that deals with development or the WP dashboard.
Use jargon-free and straightforward language for the workshop.
Share any code that was used in the workshop video.
Video and audio format guidelines: The video can be recorded using any camera, but aim for a 720p or 1080p video. The video size should be less than 1 GB so that it can be uploaded to WordPress.tv. The audio should also be of good quality. All participants should be able to clearly hear the audio content in the workshop.
Subtitles and captions: As much as possible, each Learn WordPress video should be accompanied by subtitles in the workshop language, as a baseline requirement.
Learning objectives, comprehension questions, and quizzes: Each workshop should have 4-5 learning objectives and comprehension questions (for discussion groups). Additionally, since the team is working on integrating quizzes with Learn WordPress, it would be good to have workshop creators submit quiz questions and answers with each workshop.
Training team guidelines on lesson plans
The training team already has some guidelines in place for the lesson plans. These will be excellent resources as we prepare the guidelines for Learn.
Each Learn WordPress workshop is unique. The purpose of these guidelines is not to make each workshop look like the other. On the contrary, each workshop author should have the freedom to craft the workshop in whichever way we want. The idea behind these guidelines is to ensure that all workshop authors keep a few things to make their workshops have compelling content and are useful for our participants.
These guidelines can be placed on the page where applicants submit a workshop idea – possibly as part of the confirmation page once the workshop idea is submitted. They can also be placed as a reminder and guide for someone who’s just getting started. Alternatively, these guidelines could be placed more prominently – such that a contributor actively agrees to them before even starting on their submission.
The suggestions listed in this post are just the boilerplate. We need a broader discussion to explore this idea more and would like to have feedback from members of the community on the following points.
Is it feasible to set up some guidelines for Learn?
If we decide to go ahead with these guidelines, do you have any suggestions on where we can add policies in Learn?
What are your suggestions on the guidelines listed in this post?
What are some additional guidelines you’d like to see added?
Please share your feedback on the following questions in the comments by November 30, 2020 (Monday). The deadline has been updated to December 14 (Monday).
A big thanks to members of our community for your continued support for the Learn WordPress program!
Based on the conversation that continued, it seems the following are statistics that could be collected and reported upon:
* registrations: the number of people that sign-up to attend a discussion group
* attendees: the number of people that show-up to a discussion group
Some suggestions on other metrics to collect:
* date and time of a discussion group
* which workshop is being discussed
Are there additional metrics that we should collect?
Where should these metrics be reported?
After much brainstorming, reflection, and discussion we’ll be adding non-synchronous workshops to our inspirational and educational content in addition to the online meetupsMeetupMeetup groups are locally-organized groups that get together for face-to-face events on a regular basis (commonly once a month). Learn more about Meetups in our Meetup Organizer Handbook. and events we’ve all grown accustomed to over the past several months. This exciting new effort is explained and discussed in greater detail in a recent post.
Later this month we’ll begin releasing new pre-recorded content aimed at educating and engaging both new and longterm WordPress users. While the content itself is sure to be fantastic, it’s just the starting point. Once the workshop content has been made available and community members and users have watched and learned from it, we will launch a discussion group, or series of discussion groups, to greater explore the content of each workshop.
After much brainstorming, reflection, and discussion we’ll be adding non-synchronous workshops to our inspirational and educational content in addition to the online meetupsMeetupMeetup groups are locally-organized groups that get together for face-to-face events on a regular basis (commonly once a month). Learn more about Meetups in our Meetup Organizer Handbook. and events we’ve all grown accustomed to over the past several months. This exciting new effort is explained and discussed in greater detail in a recent post.
Later this month we’ll begin releasing new pre-recorded content aimed at educating and engaging both new and longterm WordPress users. While the content itself is sure to be fantastic, it’s just the starting point. Once the workshop content has been made available and community members and users have watched and learned from it, we will launch a discussion group, or series of discussion groups, to greater explore the content of each workshop.
Yesterday I announced the application to submit Learn WordPress workshops. Today I’m excited to share with you the application to be a workshop reviewer.
Workshop reviewers will review applications for workshops in their area of expertise and in the language(s) in which they’re fluent and make recommendations on whether the workshops should be created and shared in the Learn WordPress project.
After much brainstorming, reflection, and discussion we’ll be adding non-synchronous workshops to our inspirational and educational content in addition to the online meetupsMeetupMeetup groups are locally-organized groups that get together for face-to-face events on a regular basis (commonly once a month). Learn more about Meetups in our Meetup Organizer Handbook. and events we’ve all grown accustomed to over the past several months. This exciting new effort is explained and discussed in greater detail in a recent post.
Later this month we’ll begin releasing new pre-recorded content aimed at educating and engaging both new and longterm WordPress users. While the content itself is sure to be fantastic, it’s just the starting point. Once the workshop content has been made available and community members and users have watched and learned from it, we will launch a discussion group, or series of discussion groups, to greater explore the content of each workshop.
Last weekend we participated in the Grace Hopper Women in Computing Conference‘s Open Source Day in Minneapolis. I, Alison Barrett, and Carolyn Sonnek attended as workshop teachers for the people who signed up for the WordPress section.
Alison led the group interested in working on how to contribute to coreCoreCore is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress.. They went through the setup process with svn, and worked on a javascriptJavaScriptJavaScript or JS is an object-oriented computer programming language commonly used to create interactive effects within web browsers. WordPress makes extensive use of JS for a better user experience. While PHP is executed on the server, JS executes within a user’s browser.
https://www.javascript.com patch that was submitted on tracTracTrac is the place where contributors create issues for bugs or feature requests much like GitHub.https://core.trac.wordpress.org/.. I pinged Helen and Andrew Ozz to review the ticket so the participants could get an idea for how feedback gets delivered. After lunch, Alison’s group continued to learn about wp core (they mostly had js experience, no php).
Carolyn and I each led a small group in the morning that was focused on setting up a local installLocal InstallA local install of WordPress is a way to create a staging environment by installing a LAMP or LEMP stack on your local computer. and learning how to use WordPress (they mostly had no experience with it, coming from programming backgrounds rather than content management). After lunch our two groups combined and we taught them how themes work and how to build a child themeChild themeA Child Theme is a customized theme based upon a Parent Theme. It’s considered best practice to create a child theme if you want to modify the CSS of your theme. https://developer.wordpress.org/themes/advanced-topics/child-themes/.
At the end of the day we had to get up and show a demo of what our group had worked on, so we threw together some quick posts on a test site I had (because we couldn’t have multiple people contributing to a local install simultaneously) describing some of the activity, and one of the students’ child theme was used. It won’t be representative of the class after next week, but if anyone wants to see what was shown, you can see it here until October 16, 2013 (after which I’ll remove the link and it goes back to being a test site for me).
What we learned:
Most of the computer science majors/professionals we met had heard of WordPress but not used it, and didn’t work with PHPPHPPHP (recursive acronym for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor) is a widely-used open source general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for web development and can be embedded into HTML. https://www.php.net/manual/en/preface.php.
Because of our user/developer dual audience, it’s very difficult to ensure that a targeted workshop will reach the right audience without fairly strict pre-screening. We thought our group would be all people wanting to contribute to core, but 2/3 just wanted to learn how to use WP for the first time.
Having mamp and the most recent version of wp on a thumb drive is always very handy.
We could have jumped right into using WP if we hadn’t needed to dither with database connection errors etc in mamp/wamp for the first 20-30 minutes. That said, with this audience, they liked setting up the development environment, even if they weren’t going to do anything hardcore.
The workshop was the day after the conference proper ended, so some people had to leave after lunch because they were checking out of hotels, catching flights, etc. This is something we see when we do tack-ons after WordCamps also.
We really really need to kick it into gear with building curriculums and getting them online so we can start doing trainings of all stripes.
WordPress will be participating in Grace Hopper Open Source Day 2013 at the Women in Computing Conference. It’s the same Saturday as WC Europe, so will need to see who’s heading to that before choosing a couple of (preferably women) mentorsEvent SupporterEvent Supporter (formerly Mentor) is someone who has already organised a WordCamp and has time to meet with their assigned mentee every 2 weeks, they talk over where they should be in their timeline, help them to identify their issues, and also identify solutions for their issues. to go and oversee the workshop. We’ll be guiding some first-time contributors through a first project. Told Christie (co-chair of OSD) I wanted to wait to choose our project until we were into the next dev cycle so we could pick something relevant.
An early version of https://learn.wordpress.org/ is live, with a pre-registration form for the 1st women’s workshop. Props to Mel Choyce for design, George Stephanis for CSS, and Otto for themifying it.
Like with WordCamps, we won’t announce the date and open registration until we nail down our venue, but we are shooting for the first weekend in March to run the pilot workshop. We’ll have a variety of training topics; we’re starting with troubleshooting but will eventually have one for new user setup as well. The idea is that these trainings can be run anytime.
If WordCamps want to incorporate them, great, but part of the reason for starting this training series was to make it possible to have trainings more frequently, and not attached to WordCamps. They can be attached, but in many cases it would be better to do a new user workshop a month or week before the WC, then focus on the fun stuff when the time comes.
Full-day workshops take a lot of effort, and while running them is rewarding, it’s always a bummer when the volunteers in those roles miss out on the regular WordCampWordCampWordCamps are casual, locally-organized conferences covering everything related to WordPress. They're one of the places where the WordPress community comes together to teach one another what they’ve learned throughout the year and share the joy. Learn more. stuff in order to do it. Also, that would give the newbies a little bit of time to get used to WordPress and figure out what they really want to do with it before having to choose from the regular WC sessions (a frequent complaint from new-user-workshop-at-WC grads is that they don’t know enough yet to even choose sessions to attend after the workshop ends).
