Where do we go from here?

Hey folks! Wow… things are happening quickly here. That is exciting. I’d really love to hear how you have found the training team, what you want to help with, and your why if you are up for sharing. Swing by our 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/. channel to say hello.

Where are we now?

At home most likely. Stay healthy friends. But really, as a team, we are regrouping. We have not had much activity in creating/reviewing lesson plans. We have a backlog of pull requests in our 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/ repo as well.

But – the Learn site is live! It’s been 7 years in production. Yes, 7. Learn has been the destination for our lesson plans. It is a combined contribution of our lesson plan content and theme planning while working with Design, MetaMeta Meta is a term that refers to the inside workings of a group. For us, this is the team that works on internal WordPress sites like WordCamp Central and Make WordPress., TV, Community, and more. Talk about cross-team collaboration.

What do we do now?

Well, our lessons are now rather public. This is wonderful and has spurred new contributors to swing into our Slack channel at least. I love reading the passionate contributors’ ideas popping up.

We have a few high priority issues.

  • We’ve taken branded plugins down from the Learn siteLearn site The Training Team publishes its completed lesson plans at https://learn.wordpress.org/ which is often referred to as the "Learn" site. for now. Historically, the Training team began with generic lessons.
    • Before CustomizerCustomizer Tool built into WordPress core that hooks into most modern themes. You can use it to preview and modify many of your site’s appearance settings. included the Additional CSSCSS CSS is an acronym for cascading style sheets. This is what controls the design or look and feel of a site. area, we considered several branded plugin options. We had opted against it for a time, and then opted to include ones that were part of default WordPress installs or provided functionality that CoreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. did not (contact forms, formerly sitemaps) and later to also inform users about the most popular plugins.
    • Let’s revisit if and how we can partner with brand owners (and later potentially themes as well) regarding how to best present lessons that meet the needs of trainers, document any specific needs and workflows for brand owners.
  • Coordinate with Community as we share the Learn site space to move forward.
  • Audit & prioritize the already-live lesson plans for any gaps, content to take down or update.
    • Editor (we only have Classic at a user level, missing BlockBlock Block is the abstract term used to describe units of markup that, composed together, form the content or layout of a webpage using the WordPress editor. The idea combines concepts of what in the past may have achieved with shortcodes, custom HTML, and embed discovery into a single consistent API and user experience. Editor completely)
    • Default themes mentioned are now out of date
    • Thorough check on branded content in lesson plans

We also have an influx of ideas from new participants. Let’s briefly revisit how and why. We have almost 100 repos.

  • Lesson plans are on GitHub.
  • We have a format for each lesson plan. They can be found in our GitHub repo. Factors that drew us to using this as a repo for the lesson plans before they moved to Learn can be found in the archives here. In short, the team needed a way to take a lesson through its paces on revision, auditing, and more. These plans where originally living in the team Handbook. Drafts are still there, now unpublished. The images in the media library disappeared before the move to GitHub, with much sadness.
  • Slides – we have talked about them for ages. They are useful for instructors. They may or may not hold up well in pre-recorded videos for the Community online workshop route, but can be. I’ve found them rather incomplete.
  • As long as we are using GitHub for our team/project, we need help reviewing PRs. Should we seek out Slack integration?
  • Is GitHub the best repo still for lesson plans? Those less familiar with using GitHub have a barrier to entry in contributing this way. The team does need a strong revision tool, assurance that the media library or other valuable aspects of our content will be backed up. New voices have shared an interest in where we keep those.
  • The Learn site, and any repo or staging for our lesson plans and live video workshops will need auditing as WordPress updates. 5.5 had quite a few updates to the block editor that are substantial enough to warrant revising content. We need to plot a path for reviewing the team 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. to ensure it is current, and tools within the Learn site or lesson reposrepos The Training Team uses GitHub for working copies of lesson plans. You can find them at https://github.com/wptrainingteam. to audit. @juliekuehl shared a still current and valid option that could work within Learn. (note: We don’t even have using the Block Editor lesson yet.)
  • The Learn site is now a cross-team platform. Let’s get together with a few key players from Community that helped us ship the site. As teams, we need to plot our path forward on maintaining content, interlinking, and more.
  • Workshops per the Training team were intended to be Lesson Plan + Lesson Plan + Lesson Plan = Workshop. We now have video-based workshops. Can we connect them with interlinking?
  • Our team directive was to provide downloadable materials for offline use. Lesson plans, slides, and now videos can all be potentially downloaded in ways that presenters can use offline. Are we still aiming for downloadable content?
    • Note: for slides, that wouldn’t just be a PDF, but also a way to download the related slide deck and display it in a browser, with or without connectivity.
    • @tikolan shared a tool to download slides for lesson plans. I can test that by Thursday, August 20.

For the many many contributors that have passed through the Training team, again, thank you! Props were pulled together on fast notice and can be found where the Learn site launch was announced. This was our first official time giving props for the launch.

#learn-wordpress