Marketing WordPress to Developers – January 18 2017 Meeting Notes

The Marketing WordPress to Developers team met for the first time since WordCampWordCamp WordCamps 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. US . We discussed new ideas of ways to better explain the advantages of the WordPress platform for the new developers as well as how can we improve the documentation of the WordPress features in form of case studies and white paper so it can be easily understandable to quick learners.

If you’re interested in contributing, please have a read through our chat and the items listed below and leave a comment with which you’d like to help build! You can read the whole meeting in Slack here or the recap below.

Recap of Goals/Scope: Marketing WordPress to developers: this subgroup focuses on providing development– related information, technical use cases and examples, technical best practices, and in general help developers understand how, when, and why to use WordPress when developing websites. Providing information for theme and plug-in developers would also fall in this categoryCategory The 'category' taxonomy lets you group posts / content together that share a common bond. Categories are pre-defined and broad ranging.. (Read about the other marketing subgroups in The Four Horsemen of WordPress.org Marketing)

Projects and priorities suggested

The following topics were shared in the chat. This is not an approved list of projects, just suggestions or places to start! Other suggestions are welcome (please bring them to the next monthly chat).

If a particular suggestion strikes your interest and you have time to work on it, please raise your hand in the comments with a mention about which one so those interested can start coordinating in SlackSlack Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/. (in #marketing).

  1. Continue to conduct developer interviews and compile info from WCUS meeting (notes linked here)
  2. Why WordPress for new developers to WordPress, the strengths on WordPress, reasons to use it, how to build custom sites with it. To remove the preconceived ideas that developers might have about WordPress.
  3. How to involve new developers more with WordPress? What information or guides can we provide aside from the Theme & PluginPlugin A plugin is a piece of software containing a group of functions that can be added to a WordPress website. They can extend functionality or add new features to your WordPress websites. WordPress plugins are written in the PHP programming language and integrate seamlessly with WordPress. These can be free in the WordPress.org Plugin Directory https://wordpress.org/plugins/ or can be cost-based plugin from a third-party handbooks? Where should a developer from 0 start?
    1. Getting new developers to use WordPress for site builds.
  4. What kind of interviews do we need to take to promote WordPress to new developers? Interviews can be in form of blog or video?
    1. From developer to developer – detail about the functions & features that lead them to choose WP as their CMS.
    2. Here’s how I use WP.
    3. Migrations – Most new developers are using ready-made systems like Wix, Squarespace, Weebly or a self-hosted CMS. We can find a developer who has migrated from those platform and using WP. We can take their interview and perception of migrating from self hosted to WordPress.
    4. Gathering a list of developers to interview is an idea; a list of results/outcomes is also another idea – what kinds of emotions/results/reasoning do we want the interviews to speak to?
      1. Results: rapid development / time to market.
      2. Tons of existing technology to leverage. Devs don’t have to create everything from scratch. And the technology has been betaBeta A pre-release of software that is given out to a large group of users to trial under real conditions. Beta versions have gone through alpha testing in-house and are generally fairly close in look, feel and function to the final product; however, design changes often occur as part of the process. tested by a large community.
  5. Case Studies
    1. A template for creating a case study for open sourced technologies.
    2. Case studies showing off technology like WP_API for the integration with different backends and integrations with development setups (js, php api clients).
    3. WordPress still has a reputation as a blog platform to some that are not in the know. Case studies help overcome that.
    4. Educating developers about the option to use WordPress in their software as a backend.