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.
Attendance: @chetan200891, @courane01, @knilkantha, @chaion07, @thisisyeasin, @webcommsat, @carike, @tikolan, @azhiyadev
Introductions were made and then @courane01 revisited the goal of the Training team, creating lesson plans and instructional materials for anyone to use when teaching others WordPress. Plans have been used in Meetups, traditonal classrooms, bootcamps and workshops. The #community-team uses plans in several outreach initiatives as well, particularly around what is open-source. A few people pop into #training asking to be trained.
@courane01 asked for people interested in being the key lead for welcoming new people to the channel, similar approach to how #marketing welcomes new people to their channel.
Cross-team collaboration for 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..
After years of hard work, Lesson plans are now live on https://learn.wordpress.org/ However, it is not quite ready to draw attention too yet. Meeting notes for Learn site maintenance meeting held Friday 4 September 2020 in #community-team are now available.
Prioritize lesson plans that are current/hot topics, identify which need just a little push to take live.
The team needs to assess the state of lesson plans that are ready to be visible. @carike has done a great job of finding glitches from syncing from GithubGitHub GitHub is a website that offers online implementation of git repositories that can 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/ and @courane01 has tried to compare this against the team’s Trello board (tracks what is done and ready to be live).
There are a few pull requests in Github that should be reviewed/accepted on lesson plans. @courane01 suggested possibly working on a few lessons plans that are new/hot topics like all the changes to using the 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 brought up in 5.5.
@webcommsat is working with @hlashbrooke in the community on promotions and it will be good to gather some key info regarding lesson plans on Learn when this is ready to be promoted.
Discussion welcome on lesson plans. They have been built in Github and @courane01 would like to revisit if this should continue to be the case. The inital reason for using Github was when they were moved, all lesson plans images were lost from the Training team P2P2 P2 or O2 is the term people use to refer to the Make WordPress blog. It can be found at https://make.wordpress.org/. never to be restored.
Need to consider new lesson plans to be drafted. @courane01 has come up with a few but has not written the content for them yet. @webcommsat and @hlashbrooke have talked about linking these lessons/guides from the Q&As they are working on from the release and marketing. It would be good to look at how they can be aware of when these are ready and cross promote the resources. If anyone would like to write these plans then please contact @chetan200891 or @courane01 for access.
Determine what is an agreeable arrangement with brands on brand-specific mentions for important and unavoidable areas like contact forms.
An appropriate strategy is needed to teach things like contact forms or other areas that many sites need, but coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. doesn’t include. Later we can explore the lessons around very common plugins.
Plan/document how to partner with brands.
There is a need to think through what an appropriate mention of brands entails or could do.
Sync up with Polyglots for translating lesson plans.
@courane01 mentioned the need to prepare for partnering with #polygots as we get lessons live. The video workshop area is moving towards those needs as well.
Based on the Doodle poll, team meeting moving forward will be held on Fridays at 11:00 UTC in #training. @courane01 would be delighted to see a second meeting time for PM in the Americas and AM for parts of the pacific rim. A few people have expressed interest in that time slot.
Please feel free to reach out anytime to get connected, account permissions, etc. For getting onboarded and to start contributing please look at the post written by @chetan200891 https://make.wordpress.org/training/2020/08/21/east-bay-contributor-day-2020/. It also includes video tutorials.
Attendance: @juliekuehl, @jessecowens, @man4toman, @chetan200891, @Janet357, @iwritten, @aurooba
@chetan200891 is waiting on some stuff from the 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. team.
@man4toman created his first PR for review and an issue for the footer file that needs reviewing
@jessecowens has a working version of the markdown importer but is working on getting it recognize the JSONJSON JSON, or JavaScript Object Notation, is a minimal, readable format for structuring data. It is used primarily to transmit data between a server and web application, as an alternative to XML. format, perhaps some folks at WCEU can help with that – potentially the WP-CLIWP-CLI WP-CLI is the Command Line Interface for WordPress, used to do administrative and development tasks in a programmatic way. The project page is http://wp-cli.org/ https://make.wordpress.org/cli/ team.
@aurooba put together a README file for the Learn site beta repo to help if anyone else wants to jump in and contribute. She also has a PR almost ready for the workshop template, which should be ready for submission by Sunday.
As we’ve started to build out the Learn site, @juliekuehl identified some issues that have come up in the design – things that should be checkboxes are radio buttons, etc. We have to try and figure out how to make things happen in the Make environment without the use of additional plugins.
@jessecowens will be the acting lead at WCEU for the Training team, the rest of the team can join remotely.
Contributor Day is on Thursday 20 June from 8:30-17:00 German time (UTC +2) which is Central European Summer Time
Four lesson plans have been set aside for those contributors to focus on for the workshop Best Practices for WordPress Friendly Layout. Issues have been created for all of them, so they should be ready for people to address them. We’re hoping to get the workshop to an instructional review status by the end of WCEU.
@iwritten will do some research and printout Blooms.
@juliekuehl created a ZenHub workspace (you’ll need to log in with your GitHubGitHub GitHub is a website that offers online implementation of git repositories that can 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/ account to see the workspace) set up specifically for Contributor Day with all the issues that can be addressed during that day.
@juliekuehl is working on drafting a blog post up on P2P2 P2 or O2 is the term people use to refer to the Make WordPress blog. It can be found at https://make.wordpress.org/. to help folks prepare to contribute to our team, and @jessecowens will review it.
There will be an assigned table (or a whole room) at WCEU Contributor Day for the Training team
As a reminder, due to WCEU there will be no regular weekly team meeting next week.
The following week @juliekuehl will be on vacation and @jessecowens will lead the meeting with a WCEU recap and update on everything
@juliekuehl noted that while we’ve been focused on WCEU, other things have been moving forward too. Instructional reviews. Updates to the style guide. Lesson plan pull requests.
Attendance: @juliekuehl, @jessecowens, @iwritten, @man4toman, @kartiks16, @mukesh27, @aurooba, @viitorcloudvc, @chetan200891, @lisa
@chetan200891 merged several pull requests that added the following new templates to the Learn site 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. theme:
If anyone else wants to help out with the development of the Learn site, there are clear issues with help wanted labels in the Learn site GitHub repository that you can ask to be assigned to.
@aurooba has a pull request almost ready to publish that will add a README file to the repository that shows potential contributors how to set up a local installation so they can properly contribute to the theme.
@juliekuehl: It’s going to be great to have a beta site to show to contributors at WCEU. It will help them understand how their work fits in.
@aurooba wants to discuss the transition to SCSS from CSSCSS CSS is an acronym for cascading style sheets. This is what controls the design or look and feel of a site. the next time @chetan200891 is available during the meeting as well – it will help with modularity and collaboration.
@chetan200891 is planning on adding responsive styling to the templates soon, it doesn’t currently exist. Also brought up the issue of lack of authentication fields on the Submit Lesson Idea page, and recommended that either the submitter be required to include their WordPress.orgWordPress.org The community site where WordPress code is created and shared by the users. This is where you can download the source code for WordPress core, plugins and themes as well as the central location for community conversations and organization. https://wordpress.org/ username or email, or both.
@juliekuehl also suggested we add an area for objectives and recommended @chetan200891 go ahead and add these fields to the template.
@jessecowens has been working on the markdown importer implementation and the Custom Post Types code but would love help from anyone who’d like to assist.
Currently, @jessecowens is trying to get the manifest.jsonJSON JSON, or JavaScript Object Notation, is a minimal, readable format for structuring data. It is used primarily to transmit data between a server and web application, as an alternative to XML. script perfected reliably for the markdown importer implementation.
@Janet357 made some comments on the 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. card
@juliekuehl added some information to the Slides Style Guide page in the handbook and @jessecowens is planning on getting a video up today possibly.
The folks from the Calgary Contributor Day came up with a great list of workshops based on the ideas in this post (workshops are detailed in the comments), so the next step is to decide on a workshop to focus on as a team and tackle that during WCEU Contributor Day.
@jessecowens and the communications team came up with the following snippet for the day:
The training team has identified several workshops– series of lesson plans for a specific audience/learning outcome– and we’ll be doing a “Sprint” to complete one of them. The workshop we’ll be working on, Best Practices for WordPress-Friendly Layout includes the lesson plans Introduction to CSS, Web Fonts, Using the Theme 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., and Using Child Themes.
Everyone agreed that this is a good workshop to start with and as work begins on it, more lessons will probably need to be identified and created.
Once WCEU Contributor Day happens, we can set priorities for other workshops based on the experience and feedback from WCEU.
ZenHub now has the ability to break out other workspaces and this can be useful to narrow focus and not overwhelm people as they begin to contribute.
@juliekuehl: I’m going to work on making more digestible versions [of ZenHub Workspaces] that people can use to look for issues that they can work on. Which also means that there’s a ton of issues that could be added to lesson plans
@jessecowens recommended making issues in these 4 plans to manage Contributor Day more easily.
Documentation will need to be created on how to get set up and use ZenHub if we want to use it during Contributor Day. @aurooba volunteered to kickstart the ZenHub documentation if someone (@juliekuehl volunteered) takes her through it once.
@juliekuehl: So right now there are only two “Workspaces” – the big, ugly master one and one called “Contributor Day” which is in preparation for WCEU. I can imagine adding a “New Contributors” workspace and then labeling the issues with the skills required to complete them.
@juliekuehl: WCEU is two weeks away and we will not have a meeting that week. So that would be 20 June. But we will meet next week (13 June) and be back again the week after WCEU (27 June)
The WP-CLI lesson plan has been added to the team’s reposrepos The Training Team uses GitHub for working copies of lesson plans. You can find them at https://github.com/wptrainingteam. and is looking great!
Attendance: @juliekuehl, @man4toman, @iwritten, @chetan200891, @aurooba, @Janet357, @viitorcloudvc, @jessecowens, @kartiks16, @iwritten
@chetan200891 worked on the Custom Metadata for the learn site, which can be found here.
Everyone’s comments and feedback are encouraged. For those contributors, who would like edit access, please reach out to @chetan200891.
@juliekuehl made significant progress on cleaning up and streamlining the Getting Started info in the Training Handbook to make it leaner and clearer.
@iwritten went through it today to learn and found it very helpful, so that’s good feedback!
The new glossary tool is activated on the Training Team blog, if there are other definitions anyone wants to suggest, please let @juliekuehl or another team member know!
@aurooba shared the open source plugin link for anyone who may want to take advantage of the feature.
@juliekuehl: I believe that the Handbook could still use some work around our actual workflow processes, but with the Learn site still in development some of those may be changing which is why we haven’t documented those just yet.
@jessecowens noted that there should be more videos and a lot of people concurred.
The move to ZenHub from Waffle.io for GitHubGitHub GitHub is a website that offers online implementation of git repositories that can 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/ project management also impacts the workflow, and there are a lot of new features that can be taken advantage of. This will also need to be documented.
@janet357 worked on the Style Guide and made good progress! The more comments and feedback on Handbook Information the better!
Reference: https://make.wordpress.org/training/2019/05/25/a-small-shift-in-focus/ (and the comments!)
The Calgary Contributor Day contributions included brainstorming and fleshing out outlines for 8 potential workshops targeting different audiences that the Training team could work on.
@juliekuehl noted a lot of lesson plans that were included are in various stages of development and completeness.
@Janet357 mentioned that the next is step is to decide which workshop to start on and list the lesson plans to be used. These become top priority.
@juliekuehl: So, what I’d like the team to do at this point is to think about those suggestions and make comments as to whether or not they think they are the right ones or if there are others that should be included. Then I’d like us to get down to the specifics of choosing a workshop to begin with and decide which lesson plans would be a part of it and build those out. Then we could move on to the next workshop. Basically do sprints to get a workshop built out.
@aurooba volunteered to create 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. cards for each workshop that has been suggested after she’s given access. @juliekuehl will also make an “Other Workshop Ideas” Trello card.
Everyone should comment on the Trello card for the workshop they feel can be one of the first ones to work on.
If everything can be put in place in time for 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. Europe, the aim is to do a couple sprints on workshops to get them fleshed out and completed. Beginner workshops will take precedence and will likely be the first few to be fleshed out and completed.
@juliekuehl and @jessecowens were thinking if it’s possible to also do a sprint on the learn.wordpress.orgWordPress.org The community site where WordPress code is created and shared by the users. This is where you can download the source code for WordPress core, plugins and themes as well as the central location for community conversations and organization. https://wordpress.org/ there too with the help of another team.
@aurooba suggested that the tasks left for the website be added to GitHub. @juliekuehl will go through and create issues (in the repository https://github.com/wptrainingteam/learn-theme-beta) for all the tasks noted in the Trello card (https://trello.com/c/HgCQ6Jlp). @chetan200891 also felt that getting help from a different team would be helpful!
A repository was created for the WP-CLIWP-CLI WP-CLI is the Command Line Interface for WordPress, used to do administrative and development tasks in a programmatic way. The project page is http://wp-cli.org/ https://make.wordpress.org/cli/ lesson plan that @tristup created, now it just needs to be submitted using a PR request by @tristup to https://github.com/wptrainingteam/wp-cli.
There have been a few pull requests. Some of these still need to be reviewed and a few more have come in since the last queue clean out.
The team focus is coming back to including lesson plans, and the plan is to focus intensely on them after WordCamp Europe.
@chetan200891 shared GitPod, which is an online IDE for Github, that is easy and fast to use. You can work directly on Repo. Edit, Preview and Submit PR. It’s free for open sourceOpen Source Open Source denotes software for which the original source code is made freely available and may be redistributed and modified. Open Source **must be** delivered via a licensing model, see GPL. projects! He made a video on how to work using it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmCEyyzctbk.
@juliekuehl mentioned that this may become the recommended way to work on lesson plans for the Training team and contributors. She’ll add the video to the Getting Started section in the Training Handbook.
Tasks without a specific person assigned are for anyone who’d like to contribute.
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)
Welcome and Meeting Outline
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)
@aimeegc is working on the content flow audit process and is working to have something by the end of September.
@conradhallauthor has completed the first stage of content inventory and will now begin to identify the state of each piece with the help of @coachwp and incorporate testing feedback
@bethsoderberg and @melindahelt will take a look at SupportFlow and see what needs to happen there.
@coachwp reminded us about https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1PPb9Y9eXhdZXS7QJYCcWXzyMZRVVoVDLXrEbYyTHfnY/edit#gid=0 which will be helpful to the inventory that @conradhallauthor is working on
@aimeegc mentioned in regards to processing lesson plan testing feedback (Google Spreadsheet) “This may or may not be helpful, but the name for what we’re starting to veer into is actually a whole thing called Program Evaluation (taking feedback, results, questions, etc, and making sense of it to determine whether something is working well or not, as well as turning all that data and results into actionable next steps) so it was smart to have a person working on this only, and we may want to come back to that once we have a content flow to discuss. Just stating it for the record at this point. There are people who devote their career solely to this part of what we’re endeavoring to do”
@bethsoderberg brought up a topic from our last video call that we determined that folks are not actually using our lesson plans as a script when delivering the lessons. People are not reading them word for word (which we agreed is a good thing!)
We will not be ditching the current lesson plans, but would like to brainstorm, over the long run, what format we want our lessons to have.
Once we determine a format, we will reformulate one or two plans and test those, in order to confirm the new format. THEN we may work on refactoring existing plans to fit the new, tested format.
We discussed an outline format, similar to something that could be converted to slides by the instructor.
We also discussed the original assumption that instructors didn’t already know everything (and didn’t need to) in order to pick up a lesson plan and teach it.
@aaimeeg shared a sample lesson plan format: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1JDgl8BJ9c7Q2moaUkyG075RD5wlX0Yb0xsEZlME4aYI/edit
@aimeegc shared the following from 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. for Publishers:
A lot of what I heard was about the frustration that WordPress developers aren’t ramped up enough for the kinds of developer positions open (in Publishing, but I bet this is true elsewhere), and it would be great to channel people’s desire to learn and get good at WordPress specific to goals and industry. WordPress developing is context-specific, so it would be great to see more support or direction being applied to what people want to do with what they’re learning about WordPress.
I’m not entirely sure how that should fit into our scope as it currently exists, but if our goal is to provide official training and skill building to become professional wordpress developers, through helping teachers of WordPress teach others, then it might be worthwhile to entertain how we might consider this need from our wider WordPress community
@bethsoderberg mentioned that this could potentially be addressed in the future workshop plans rather than individual lesson plans themselves.
1. Content flow and process (see Aimee’s post on this for quick reference)
2. Inventory of what we have
3. Team goals
4. Next steps
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)
@chanthaboune will be stepping away from the team as she’s been asked to lead a second team at work. Very special thanks to @chanthaboune for the spirit, insights, support, and contributions to this team. We appreciate everything you’ve done and will miss you (but will see you soon!).
We will need a new backup for @bethsoderberg moving forward.
@coachwp took the lead on this meeting in @chanthaboune‘s absence, welcoming some new and returning attendees.
Lesson Plan Updates
@jenwill mentioned that she may soon be looking for feedback on the progress of the Enqueuing Scripts and Styles Lesson Plan she’s working on.
No other updates on new/assigned Lesson Plans.
@donkiely asked if there was any update on why the images are returning 404 errors. No-one on the meeting had any additional information and agreed to wait for an update from @chanthaboune.
@coffee2code later responded with an update: Images have to be restored and a request sits with Systems to look into it.
Copyediting Updates
@mike_piercy noticed some grammatical errors on some pages and @juliekuehl granted access edit to update.
@awakekat noticed some editing required on the Child-Theme quiz questions. @donkiely confirmed that this was marked as needing revision.
Q&A and Announcements
@juliekuehl asked if anyone knew if there was anything happening at Summit regarding Training. No-one on the meeting knew and @coachwp reverts this question back to @chanthaboune
