Beth Soderberg 6:10 pm on May 10, 2016  

Recap for May 10th Meeting

Slack Log (Requires 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/. login to view. Set one up if you don’t have a Slack account)

  1. Welcome
  2. Updates on in-progress lesson plans
    1. @toniaslimm asked for feedback on the “Keeping WordPress Sites Secure” lesson plan and @bethsoderberg volunteered to take a look.
    2. Everyone is really busy and hasn’t made much progress. We did discuss that having a more concrete goal of completing the initial workshops for the 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, theme, and basic-intermediate troubleshooting workshops would be good. Roughly, if we can get these done by the end of September, then we can roll into testing in October.
    3. @chanthaboune met with the HtH folks on Thursday and their expansion (that we didn’t know about) has ended up taking a lot more of their time than they thought. So, they have the curriculum and are testing it on their side as well, but they won’t have a big Weekend Event until this summer. Connecting for Good (a group in Kansas City) is planning on using this curriculum on basically a monthly rotation all summer and into the second half of the year. The… National Digital Inclusion Alliance….or something like that, is happening in Kansas City this year, so we are getting some kudos for our work at that event which is nice.
    4. @chanthaboune reports that hosting, which has been complex, is in the works with Bluehost. Those lovely folks are going to work on a solution that doesn’t include a CC number for us. @skarjune noted that 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. Minneapolis will be using Pantheon free accounts with Pantheon’s Drew Gorton assisting.
  3. Copyediting updates
    1. @toniaslimm has been working on editing of the “Creating Your WordPress Talk” plan.
  4. Quarterly Lesson Plan Amnesty Drive
    1. About once a quarter we go through and make sure that all of the lesson plans that are currently listed as having an author really do have an author. If you have a lesson plan listed in this list, it’s simply because we have noted that you are working on the plan. If you no longer can/want to, that is OK – we just want to know! In this case please pingPing The act of sending a very small amount of data to an end point. Ping is used in computer science to illicit a response from a target server to test it’s connection. Ping is also a term used by Slack users to @ someone or send them a direct message (DM). Users might say something along the lines of “Ping me when the meeting starts.” @bethsoderberg over Slack. This week is the last week we’ll be pushing out this last, after that we’ll return any plans left in the list to the pile. (NOTE: lesson plans that were confirmed last week do not appear in the list this week).
  5. Questions & Announcements
    1. @melindahelt shared some of the feedback from the workshop testing in Pittsburgh:
      • “I’m still waiting for the rest of the feedback on our Tier 1 lesson plan (we had two teachers + two TAs and we are all putting our thoughts in Google Doc). Some of the feedback is LP specific, and some is just about overall how we did the workshop. I’m going to keep all of the feedback in the document, because even though some of it is outside the scope of the team, it might be helpful for others who are testing.However, one piece that I thought was a great suggestion (from a TA who has a ton of WP experience but was new to the idea of the lessons): “I think it would be good that if students all worked towards building the same website…so yeah, everyone would have the same site, but it would be easier to keep the class on track and still teach them all the various features they would need to then make their own site.”…I know in our workshop, some people were following along in the sandbox site, others were looking at their own site (which, we can’t control) but if we gave them a zip file of images and greeking but everyone would make the same menu, install the same plugins, etc”
      • @chanthaboune asked if the sample websites are “something that would be easy to add after the lessons are written or would it be best to add as we go?”
      • @courtneyengle mentioned using the theme unit test data, which has the additional benefit of not having “to maintain our theme unit test data xml file ourselves [since] that’d be a lot to account for every feature.”
      • @courtneyengle mentioned “in a super ideal world, it’d be awesome to have a zip file that worked on mac/windows that when unpacked had WP as a local installLocal Install A local install of WordPress is a way to create a staging environment by installing a LAMP or LEMP stack on your local computer. with all the default themes and theme unit test data ready for students. That is complicated for a few reasons as far as standardizing… and negates them learning how to set up an install…. but it sure helps get things moving to just teach them how to navigate around the basics”
      • In general we liked the idea of having a sample site and are putting a pin in it to think about it.
      • From @melindahelt: “One second piece of overall feedback that I wanted to bring up is the format of the LP pages. I know we have agreed on no slides or PDFs for maintenance reasons (which I agree 100%), but just hitting print on the LP pages was not the best approach as it printed all of the sidebars all of the time, etc. (Yes, I could have exported content and did my own)… can we explore an easy way to print the LPs… a print style sheet or something like that? (I know that’s a big request)”
    2. We talked a bit about which WordCamp Contributor Days we’ll be attending soon:
      1. @chanthaboune will be at WCEU and Boston’s
      2. @bethsoderberg will be at New York City’s
      3. @c3zh will be at the ones attached to the following WordCamps IF they have contributor days: Hamilton, Toronto, Montreal, Rochester
    3. @chanthaboune and @toniaslimm will both be out for next week’s meeting.