The WordPress training team creates downloadable lesson plans and related materials for instructors to use in live environments. If you enjoy teaching people how to use and build stuff for WordPress, immediately stop what you’re doing and join our team!
Regardless of your skill set, you can help! We need people to write, copyedit, test, audit, connect, and review our lesson plans. Find out how to get started.
The Training Team proposes the following criteria for their profile badges:
Awarding of profile badges: There will be a monthly review of contributions, and badges will be awarded at that time. A list of the new profile badges awarded will then be posted on the https://make.wordpress.org/training/ site. If you feel that you have earned the badge but were not listed, please leave a comment on that month’s blog post and include your GitHub username and your WordPress.org username.
There has been a recent flurry of pull requests from people new to the Training Team. Most of these pull requests are fixing small issues with the lesson plans – and we have many of those! However, these contributors have not introduced themselves to the team in Slack or participated in the team’s meetings. Their efforts are seemingly to procure the Training Team badge on their WordPress.org profile. That raises the issue of what the requirements are to secure those badges.
The Training Team would like to be more transparent and consistent and define the criteria for giving profile badges to people who contribute to our team.
Looking at how a few other non-code-focused teams handle their badges…
“On your profile, badges are added based on your contributions to the WordPress project. There are two kinds of badges: contributor and team. The contributor badges are generally assigned to anyone who has contributed to a particular team. Meanwhile, the team badges are given to those who are active on their team. Each team can set its own criteria for who should get each badge. When possible, the meta team will automate badge assignment.”
(https://make.wordpress.org/meta/handbook/documentation/profile-badges/)
The Polyglots Team requires ten string translations to earn their Contributor badge. The also have an “Editor” badge which is given when a person has Editor status on a [locale].wordpress.org site.
“We have official badges for Support Contributors and Support team members. For the moment being, these badges are awarded manually to active contributors. In the future, we hope to be able to automate that process, and then use the following criteria:
The documentation team is probably the team that is the closest to the Training Team in their responsibilities. They do not yet have criteria for their badges but are also working on this.
One-time contributions are very welcome, but perhaps not the purpose of the badges. As a starting point for discussion, let’s consider the following:
Too easy? Too difficult? Does it deter people or encourage them? Is the “over 30 days” part a good idea? Thoughts? These criteria are up for discussion!
It’s that time of year when we need to evaluate how we did against our goals for this year and make new goals for the upcoming year.
In 2018 our goals were to:
1. Create handbook
2. Move lesson plans to GitHub
3. Restructure make.wordpress.org/training
4. Fix broken images
5. Update lesson plans for 4.8-4.9/Gutenberg
6. Make workshop recommendations
7. Accessibility workshop
In fact, 2018 was a year where the team underwent a major restructuring of its tool and processes and we accomplished goals we hadn’t imagined when the year started. So our accomplishments for the year can be summed up as:
1. Create handbook (expected by the end of the year)
2. Move lesson plans to GitHub
3. Restructure make.wordpress.org/training
4. Fix broken images (perhaps not all are fixed, but moving to GitHub addressed the problem)
5. Make workshop recommendations
plus
6. Onboarding improvements including a PDF and videos
7. Team management on Trello and in Waffle.io
8. Creation of the https://wptrainingteam.github.io/ page
9. Work towards the relaunch of the learn.wordpress.org site including collaboration with the #design, #marketing, and #meta teams.
Goals that we didn’t quite accomplish include:
1. Update lesson plans for Gutenberg
2. Accessibility workshop
So, for 2019 what should our new goals be? I’d propose a couple to begin with:
1. Launch learn.wordpress.org
2. Create several lesson plans to combine into an accessibility workshop (the ARIA session from WordCamp US has caught my eye…)
3. Use resources from WordPress.tv more often as a basis for lesson plans
4. Collaborate with other efforts such as the diversity speaker training and Kids Camp to get their material available from the learn.wordpress.org site
5. Increase the number of regular contributors to the team
These all seem very do-able. What else should the team be working towards? What should we have for stretch goals? All comments and ideas welcome!
We’ll also be discussing this during our meeting this week. Everyone is invited to join in the discussion!!!
WordCamp US is approaching and will be in Philadelphia in early December, with a contributor day on the 4th. Since this will be an opportunity for many contributors of the training team to meet in person we want to make sure we’re gathering a list of all of the items we’d like to address as a team beforehand to make the most efficient use of our time together.
We’ll chat about this subject over the next few weeks in team meetings and will use this post as a place to store our thoughts and asynchronously share our ideas.
Please add your ideas in the comments!
The topic of what process should be used for copyediting lesson plans and what tools could be used came up during the October 11 Make WordPress Training Meeting. During the Slack discussion, questions arose about how team members should handle copyediting concerns.
The Make WordPress Training Getting Started page indicates the various roles of contributors on the Training Team:
The workflow for Training Lesson Plans is tracked on a Google Apps Sheet: WP Community Training Lesson Plan Progress as in the Getting Started section. The general workflow for lessons is tracked in a Status field:
In addition there is tracking of lesson assignments with the following fields:
There is a Key tab in the Progress Sheet, but that appears to be out of date:
Make WordPress Training includes two guides for writing and editing lesson plans:
There is a set of guides and tracking documents already in place; it seems they could be reviewed for updates and documentation to clarify the copyediting process.
Plugin features would be helpful for copyediting tasks and workflow for published lesson plans. However, with editorial tracking already in place with the Progress sheet, the plugin does not need to recreate nor constrain that part of the process.
Some potential solutions:
Are there other copyediting concerns or potential solutions?
Folks in the training team have collectively provided bits of feedback about the current structure of the Make site for the team for a little while. This conversation turned into more of an in-depth evaluation of the site and it’s purpose at WordCamp NYC’s contributor day this past month. In this post, I’m summarizing some of the key pieces of that conversation (myself, @melindahelt and @Becks979 attended) and applying pieces of that conversation to the current structure of the website. Please add your thoughts as to what pieces of the website need to shift in the comments of this post.
Please add your reactions to any of these ideas, suggestions of changes we can make to improve the user experience of the website, and any other thoughts about the website in the comments!
In yesterday’s team meeting we discussed that the current meeting time (17:00 UTC on Tuesdays) may not be the best meeting time for folks anymore and decided that we should poll everyone and evaluate whether or not we should move the time. Once we have a sense of our internal availability, we’ll check these times against the times of the other WordPress team meetings to make sure those aren’t overlapping with our meeting either.
And so, a few questions for everyone:
Please comment on this post and we’ll discuss in next week’s team meeting! In your comments, make sure to specify availability either in UTC time or to specify the time zone that you’re referring to.
There was a troubleshooting workshop that was put together years ago by some awesome people in the community. In March, I reached out to @ipstenu, who shared the troubleshooting resources from the workshop held years ago. They are located at breakfix.elftest.net and we have permission to use the materials and reformulate them for our lesson plans. Per the group’s initial conversations about this subject, we thought the first step to adapt these lessons for the training team is to inventory what is there and make a list of lessons that could be made out of it and then piece together what needs to happen from there.
The original workshop that was conducted using these resources is described here: https://learn.wordpress.org/workshops/. The original workshop included the following description for potential students to make sure that folks with the skills to make use of the workshop material were the ones who attended the workshop:
For this course to make sense, students need to have the following experience:
If you have any experience with SQL (phpMyAdmin is fine), SSH, and/or manually installing WordPress, that’s a plus, but not required.
You do not not need to know PHP or JavaScript for this workshop.
I went through the whole website that @ipstenu created and have created a basic list of what resources are there and what we already have that could fit together in a workshop. A significant amount of the content on the breakfix.elftest.net site is actually individual troubleshooting exercises, so I went back to my notes from the inaugural workshop (which coincidentally I attended and thankfully still have the notes from!) to fill in some other pieces in this outline.
All of these exercises need to be done on a local install as they are dangerous to do on the real internet. We already have a lesson plan for local installs (yay!) BUT we could take a look at the breakfix version and see if there is anything from it that would be helpful to pull. In terms of lessons I outlined titles and relevant pages from the website or just bullets from my notes/thoughts.
This outline is fairly comprehensive for an initial outline of such a workshop, but begs a few questions that were raised by folks on the team in our meeting last week (thanks @melindahelt and @chanthaboune!), namely:
Next steps on this set of lessons are as follows:
Please add your thoughts/comments/feedback/etc. in the comments. All of this will be incredibly valuable as we move forward with making our first troubleshooting workshop!
In last week’s team meeting, I brought up a few common styling issues that copy editors have noticed while editing lesson plans. As promised, I’m expanding that list here. For more details on many of the items referenced in this list, please refer to the style guide.
Issues we’ve seen frequently include:
We’ll be using this list to create a checklist for lesson plan authors to go through before submitting their plans for copyediting and for copy editors to use while editing, so please list any additional items you’ve noticed in the comments!
