Pivot!

After working with our lesson plans over the last few weeks as we moved them into GitHubGitHub GitHub is a website that offers online implementation of git repositories that can easily be shared, copied and modified by other developers. Public repositories are free to host, private repositories require a paid subscription. GitHub introduced the concept of the ‘pull request’ where code changes done in branches by contributors can be reviewed and discussed before being merged be the repository owner. https://github.com/, a couple of things became obvious:

  • GitHub project boards are focused on individual issues and their resolution while we are focused on a lesson plan development workflow which happens at the repo level.
  • GitHub project boards get really gnarly when trying to keep track of the issues for over 100 reposrepos The Training Team uses GitHub for working copies of lesson plans. You can find them at https://github.com/wptrainingteam. on one board.
  • The verification process to make sure the README files in GitHub looked as much as possible as the pages on the Make site has a lot of steps to it, is hard to communicate, and is very time consuming.
  • Nearly all our lesson plans need to be rewritten or at least revisited with new screenshots and updated information.

So two things came out of this revelation:

  • GitHub project boards are not the place we need to be working (but GitHub still is!)
  • We should just consider all our lesson plans as needing a fresh start.

After several discussions over the past week, testing out a few new tools, dredging up some old ones, and talking with other teams, the team is going to make some changes to our processes. To be clear, our basic steps for creating lesson plans hasn’t changed, though. Our lesson plan development process will continue to have these basic steps:

1. Identify and define topic
2. Create first draft (template)
3. Copy edit draft at least twice
4. Review for style guide adherence
5. Release for testing
6. Test in a live event (#1)
7. Collect feedback (template)
8. Incorporate feedback
9. Test in a live event (#2)
10. Collect feedback (template)
11. Incorporate feedback
12. Test in a live event (#3)
13. Collect feedback (template)
14. Incorporate feedback
15. Mark as complete and make available for use

But what we’re going to change is that we will be using a Trello board to manage our lesson plan development (https://trello.com/b/BsfzszRM/wordpress-training-team-lesson-plan-development) in addition to our GitHub organization (https://github.com/wptrainingteam). We have connected the two and will be tracking issues and progress on Trello. (The Trello board is still a work in progress as more cards need to be created.)

What Does All This Mean for the Training Team Contributors?

No doubt there are details yet to be figured out and improvements needed to this process. But it’s a better place to work from that where we’ve been for the past several weeks. Time to move forward with lesson plan development!

  • You’ll need both a GitHub and a TrelloTrello Project management system using the concepts of boards and cards to organize tasks in a sane way. This is what the make.wordpress.com/marketing team uses for example: https://trello.com/b/8UGHVBu8/wp-marketing. account to contribute.
    • The GitHub repos are public and you should be able to see everything there
    • You will need to request to be added to the team in Trello to work with the cards on the board there. (DM @juliekuehl or @pbrocks 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/. with your Trello account email)
  • You should check the Trello board, not GitHub, to see where lesson plans are in the pipeline and what needs doing (aka where you can help out).
  • Anyone can start working on pretty much any lesson plan at this point.

If you have any questions, comments, or ideas, please leave a comment here or start a discussion on the #training channel in Slack.