Summary of August 2024 Media Corps Briefing

• [00:27:00] Javier Casares (WPpodcast): When you finish a lesson/something, is there any idea of showing that somewhere in “your profile”? Like a new tab (prefer) or in the activity?
• [00:30:03] Javier Casares: Is there any idea of having an “official” certification from the Community in some way? (Maybe related to the question before in your profile)
• [00:36:17] Javier Casares: Another big thing around Learn… is multilingual. Something new about it?
• [00:39:40] Rae (The Repository): How many contributors are working on creating courses/lessons?

00:00:12 – Reyes Martínez
All right, I think we are ready. Hello, everyone, and welcome to this Media Corps briefing. Thank you for taking the time to join us today. I’m Reyes and I’ll be facilitating today’s session. Before we dive into today’s agenda, I would like to remind everyone that this session is being recorded. And I also thought I would share what you can expect from the session. So first of all, I’ll start by giving an overview of some of the latest WordPress releases, community updates, and events. And then we’ll move on to discuss the new Learn WordPress experience. We have some training contributors with us today who will share more information about this launch and address any questions you might have. Kathryn, Cynthia and Jonathan, would you like to introduce yourselves?

00:01:15 – Kathryn Presner
Sure, I guess we’ll go in the order you just said. I’m Kathryn Presner and I’m based in Montreal, Canada. And I’ve been working with WordPress since 2008, first as a WordPress designer developer, and then as a happiness engineer with WordPress.comWordPress.com An online implementation of WordPress code that lets you immediately access a new WordPress environment to publish your content. WordPress.com is a private company owned by Automattic that hosts the largest multisite in the world. This is arguably the best place to start blogging if you have never touched WordPress before. https://wordpress.com/. And now I am a sponsored contributor working with the training team. And so I’ve helped with the remake of learn.wordpress.org. And I help do other things in the community, like helping out with a guide program that the training team has to mentor new contributors and a whole bunch of other things involving the training team. So it’s great to be here.

00:01:53 – Reyes Martínez
Thanks, Kathryn. Cynthia, did I pronounce your name correctly?

00:02:01 – Cynthia Norman
Yeah. Perfect. Hi, thanks for having me here. I am a new contributor with the training team. My background is a freelance WordPress developer for the past four years. I’ve been exclusively working with WordPress. And previous to freelancing, I was actually a C-sharp programmer for a SaaS company.

00:02:29 – Reyes Martínez
Nice. Thank you for joining us. Jonathan.

00:02:34 – Jonathan Bossenger
Hey, everybody. I’m Jonathan. I’m from Cape Town, South Africa. It’s nice to see some of you for the first time. I’ve definitely had some communication and conversations with some of you over the past years, but it’s nice to actually see some faces that are folks that I recognize. And I, like Kathryn, I’m a sponsored contributor to the training team. And I work with folks like Cynthia to create all the educational content, the lessons, the online workshops that we have on Learn WordPress.

00:03:05 – Reyes Martínez
Thank you so much, Jonathan, and thank you everyone again for joining us. Okay, after discussing the new learn WordPress updates. If time permits, I will also try to share a quick rundown of the latest showcase entries.

And finally, we will open the floor for other discussion topics and questions about the Media Corps project. We have Jen as well, who has been helping with the Media Corps project, so I’m sure she’ll also be helping addressing any questions or discussion topics we might have. As a reminder, you are welcome to share any questions during the session in the chat. So when first submitting a question, just please remember to indicate indicate the media outlet or channel that you represent, so we can have more context. And I think that’s pretty much all.

00:04:01 – Reyes Martínez
Do you have any questions so far? All good. Okay. Let’s dive right into our first agenda topic then. On WordPress releases and community program updates. One second, let me first share. Okay, some relevant links in the chat that I’ll be, one second, that I’ll be mentioning for reference. There are a bunch of links, so don’t worry. I’ll be just mentioning the different updates. But there you go, so you can have them for reference.

All right. WordPress 6.6.1 released on July 23rd. This maintenance release featured seven bug fixes in core and nine for the block editor. In episode 84 of the WordPress Briefing Podcast, Josepha Haden Chomphosy and Meher Bala, 6.6 release coordinator, discussed WordPress 6.6 and Meher’s journey from contributing to marketing to leading their release. If you haven’t, give that a listen, I highly recommend it. And numerous media partners covered and helped amplify the 6.6 release. So I just wanted to note and express a big thank you for all those contributions.

And we are right now in the WordPress 6.7 release cycle with 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. 1 scheduled for October 1. And we should expect an update on the 6.6, sorry, 6.7 release squad very soon. As you might know, Gutenberg 18.9 was released on July 31 and introduced new updates to data views, some consistent design tool support across more blocks and improved usability when editing and applying font size presets in global styles, among other highlights. And if you’re interested in learning more about what’s being worked on in the Gutenberg plugin, I recommend you check out the next hallway hangout, which is scheduled for August 15th.

00:06:33 – Reyes Martínez
Okay, moving on to WordPress Playground. The team recently announced that it supports offline mode and that it can be installed as a progressive web app. These features allow folks to explore and experiment with WordPress without needing an active internet connection. Which makes it easier to develop and test their ideas on the go. So this is a very cool update actually. And lastly, WordPress developers with experience or interest in extending core blocks are encouraged to share their insights in a 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/ discussion on core block extensibility. You can also find that link in the chat.

00:07:14 – Reyes Martínez
Any questions so far? All good? Okay, let’s move on then to… Well, let me check the… Okay, yeah, perfect. Okay, moving on to other community news and upcoming events. The next cohort of the WordPress Mentorship Program is scheduled for October-November of this year. The call for interest, which closed in mid July, attracted 54 mentee applications and 30 from prospective mentors.

The community team also published an analysis of global trends in WordPress meetups and a working group has been formed to analyze regional trends. 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. US 2024 is approaching fast. It’s taking place from September 17th to 20th in Portland, Oregon. The organizing team recently reopened the call for volunteers until tomorrow, August 8, and published the details and location of the social event, just in case you haven’t seen those posts. And the schedule will be published in the coming weeks, if I’m not mistaken. But in the meantime, any help amplifying and encouraging people to get tickets will be highly appreciated. 

And the last item on upcoming events that I have on my list is the State of the WordState of the Word This is the annual report given by Matt Mullenweg, founder of WordPress at WordCamp US. It looks at what we’ve done, what we’re doing, and the future of WordPress. https://wordpress.tv/tag/state-of-the-word/.. As you might know, State of the Word is the annual keynote addressed by WordPress leadership and will take place this year on December 16th in Tokyo, Japan. The event will highlight this year’s achievements of the 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. project and outline its future direction and vision. And I just wanted to share that we should get some updates out later this month, so stay tuned. But yeah, I’ll keep you all posted on that. Okay, I think that’s all on the first agenda items. Do you have any questions before we move on to discuss the learn WordPress experience?

00:09:34 – Reyes Martínez
Okay, I don’t see any questions in the chat. Feel free also to unmute if you.

00:09:40 – Jen Miller
Did you have a date for the block extensibility meeting? Is that the hallway hangout? Or is that a separate event?

00:09:55 – Reyes Martínez
No, the discussion on GitHub is still open. There are no dates, I believe. There’s a current discussion and that’s still open for developers to share feedback and insights on that.

00:10:06 – Jen Miller
Okay, good. Just wanted to make sure.

00:10:09 – Reyes Martínez
Thank you, Jen.

00:10:13 – Reyes Martínez
All right, I believe there are no further questions so next on our agenda is the announcement of the new Learn WordPress experience, which went live a few days ago. Just as a brief introduction for context, since 2020 Learn WordPress has been a hub for consistent, high-quality educational resources that users can trust to learn WordPress.

And the platform has recently undergone a significant transformation, with a new modern interface and the introduction of learning pathways. This improves the overall user experience with a learner-centric approach. And I know this has been a collaborative project which has involved multiple contributors and teams, including training, meta, work, marketing, sorry, and design folks. Kathryn or Jonathan, would you like to explain a little bit more about the learning pathways, why they matter, and the vision behind the new Learn experience?

00:11:33 – Jonathan Bossenger
Shall I’ll take that one, Kathryn. Sure. So with this sort of official launch of the, you know, the Learn WordPress we knew before the relaunch that happened, the training team did a bit of research with our individual learners survey at around about the end of 2022, beginning of 2023.

And we wanted to find out from learners what was working, what wasn’t working, what would they like to see. And the big item that we saw a lot, a lot of people were saying was a more structured, more defined approach to learning WordPress. So those of you who remember Learn WordPress, when it sort of kicked off in 2020, there were some courses, there were some tutorials, but it was kind of very random, very scattershot. There was no specific path if you were brand new to WordPress, where to start, where to go from there. Once you’ve then gotten used to WordPress, what’s the next step? Do you want to build with WordPress? Do you want to develop themes? Do you want to develop plugins? And so we realized that this was something the community wanted. And so we spent about a year or so kind of defining what that might look like. And that’s how we came up with this idea of structured learning pathways.

So the learning pathways that we’ve currently launched with, we’ve got at the moment we’re on three different user types, focusing specifically on WordPress users, so those that are brand new to WordPress or getting used to WordPress. We also want to create content for designers, for those that are building sites with WordPress, designing with WordPress, and then also developers. A big reason why Cynthia and I are involved is that it’s a big ask from the community for high-quality developer-focused content. So we’ve launched with four learning pathways, two user pathways, two developer pathways. We have a whole bunch more coming that we’re working on. And that’s kind of the history behind all of that and how we got there. Kathryn, I don’t know if you want to chat maybe a little bit about the design and how we ended up there.

00:13:42 – Kathryn Presner
Sure. Actually, I’m going to just share my screen. I want to just show what the site looked like before for those who might not remember. This is what it looked like before. So the focus was on tutorials, which were sort of one-off videos about a specific topic, and lesson plans, which were geared to people teaching WordPress to others. And then as Jonathan said, there were some courses, but no real and then tutorials here. These little graphics did not used to be here. And so this is what it looked like before. And when it was relaunched, this is what it looks like now. So it was the design was overhauled to better match the rest of the .org site, at least the parts of the .org site that have been revamped and refreshed. So it’s a much more coherent look now.

And also before it was very text heavy. You know, apart from these sort of trapezoids or whatever that shape is called, it was really text heavy. So these graphics were created to represent the different user types. So this is for developers. And this is for users. And as Jonathan mentioned, there will be learning pathways for designers coming and also there’ll be learning pathways for contributors coming further down the road. And then, these little thumbnail graphics were created. So the design team created this incredible tool in Figma called the thumbnail generator. And we created a set of instructions and even a video on how to create these thumbnails because we have these hundreds of courses and lessons.

So courses are composed of multiple lessons. So you’ll see here, beginner developer has 59 lessons. Beginner user has 24. And each of these courses and lessons needed a little thumbnail graphic to add visual interest to the site and variety and make it a lot more interesting to look at than it used to be. So the community actually rallied around and created hundreds of thumbnail graphics for all these pieces of content. So you can see now if you go to see all courses, There are all these little graphics. And this is a community that did these. So we had sessions online. We had sessions. I did a little session at WordCamp Canada. We had a meetupMeetup All local/regional gatherings that are officially a part of the WordPress world but are not WordCamps are organized through https://www.meetup.com/. A meetup is typically a chance for local WordPress users to get together and share new ideas and seek help from one another. Searching for ‘WordPress’ on meetup.com will help you find options in your area.. We had an impromptu contributor hour. So there were all sorts of activities to get people helping to create these graphics and then helping upload them.

So I think that’s a cool example of how the community really pulled together to make the site look great. So yeah, that’s a little bit about the site. And just as Jonathan said, if we go into one of these, learning pathway areas, you can see that for now there are two courses on developing with WordPress, one for beginner developers. And if you click on it, you’ll see that it consists of modules, chunks of lessons. And within each module, there are lessons. And many of these lessons were set to be previewable, which means that without even needing a .org account, without even needing to click take this course, you don’t even have to be logged in, you can actually see the whole lesson. So the only thing you won’t be able to do is take a quiz if there’s a quiz with the course.

So I think this is really cool because it means people can dive in, appreciate the content and think, oh, hey, you know what, I actually want to sign in, take this course. And then create a dot org account and then sort of, you know, get enveloped in the community and hopefully participate further. So, and the other thing I don’t know what Jonathan if you want to talk a little about this practice on a demo site or

00:17:32 – Jonathan Bossenger 
Sure. So this ties back into what Reyes was saying earlier about WordPress Playground and the fact that Playground exists. So there are direct links from the course landing page to be able to spin up a WordPress Playground instance. So as you’re working through the course, you can have the instance in your browser, so you don’t need a local WordPress install. You can just go through and you can can test out the things that you’re learning.

We’re also busy working on being able to, there’s a WordPress playground block that we’re embedding in the lessons themselves. So for specific lessons, you’ll just be able to, in the lesson itself, when you finish the lesson, have a little practical running in WordPress playground that you’ll be able to test your knowledge right then and there. And because it’s running on Playground, you can just export that to your local machine. If you’re doing the developer side of things and you’re writing code, you can see the code making changes live in that Playground block and then download that code locally if it’s a theme or it’s a plugin. So we’re still busy experimenting with the best ways to use all of that. There’s been some accessibilityAccessibility Accessibility (commonly shortened to a11y) refers to the design of products, devices, services, or environments for people with disabilities. The concept of accessible design ensures both “direct access” (i.e. unassisted) and “indirect access” meaning compatibility with a person’s assistive technology (for example, computer screen readers). (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accessibility) issues that we’ve been fixing in the Playground block to get that working.

But we’re really hoping to make Learn at WordPress.org, the place where you come to not only learn WordPress, but also practice WordPress, and practice what you’ve learned without needing to go anywhere else, without needing to install anything else, and really make it this interactive, fun experience. We all know that learning is important, but it’s often very slow and boring and tedious, and so we’re trying to make it as interactive and as fun as possible as we possibly can.

The other thing I want to mention, and it’s difficult to see this because of the resolution on Kathryn’s screen, but one of the biggest bugbears that I had about the old site was that we had this very narrow content area. I think it was set at like 800 pixels or something from, you know, back in 2020. Now it’s a lot wider, so it takes up more of the screen real estate. So if you’re on a bigger screen, you won’t have all these white areas on the side. You can see it’s kind of stretched on Kathryn’s screen. So it just means we can present more content to you. So we’ve really tried to modernize the entire experience and just make it a fun place to be.

00:19:38 – Reyes Martínez
Nice. Looks very, very exciting. The site actually looks great. So I’m really excited about it. And Cynthia, I believe, well first of all, congrats on receiving the Kim Parsell Memorial Scholarship. I know you have had a key role in developing the content of the Intermediate Theme Developer course, which is one of the courses that are already out and available. Would you like to tell us briefly about your experience and how do you believe the developer learning pathways will also benefit developers in the community?

00:20:20 – Cynthia Norman
Love to share my experience. So I am an unsponsored contributor, which means that I would wake up in the morning, do my content creation, and then switch over to doing my day job. So it was it was very time consuming, but it was a lot of fun. I fell into the training team quite easily. I do have A background in education as well, and computer training. And so this felt natural for me.

I was fortunate, however, when I jumped in, all that research that Jonathan talked about, that was done for me. So I have experience in developing curriculum, and I know how choosing the topics and creating the outline creating that content is very time consuming. So that was all done for me. I actually based all of my lessons on the theme handbook that’s available in docs. So that made it, you know, that I could quickly get into the creative portion, which was creating the script and the video. So then I edited the video and then I used Camtasia for that. And then I created the lessons that were just shown to you. So I would go in and add my video and the text.

So now we get to focus on the fun stuff that Jonathan is talking about, and that’s making sure that people that are going through can feel that they have an opportunity to assess their comprehension, so they can do some hands-on activities and some quizzes. So, go beyond that visual experience and play around either within Playground or their local development environment. I don’t see myself leaving the training team anytime soon. There’s so much fun work ahead of us.

00:22:53 – Reyes Martínez
Well, that’s great to hear. Jonathan, please go ahead.

00:22:58 – Jonathan Bossenger 
I just wanted to add to what Cynthia said. She reminded me about the fact that the foundation of our lessons are the documentation. So almost every lesson that exists in these courses has a link back to some piece of documentation somewhere. And the great thing about this is that as we’re busy creating this content, if we see documentation that needs a little bit of a tweak, or it needs a bit of an update, then we can go and we can, you know, chat to the Docs team and we can say, hey, we need to fix this, we need to fix that. It got to a point over the course of the last sort of six months to a year that we were working on these learning pathways but the Docs team just basically said to me, just fine, just go and fix it. And I got full admin rights to go and make the changes. But it just means we’re helping to make the documentation better in the process.

We’re seeing as we’re exploring these things, and this is what was great about having Cynthia on board. Cynthia is a much more experienced theme developer than I am. So she was coming up with, okay, how are we going to teach this? How are we going to teach that? Bouncing ideas off me, and then we would discover, oh, maybe this documentation needs to be moved around, needs to be changed slightly to make more sense to somebody learning about theme development.

So the great thing about, you know, there’s that old saying of, the only way you really can understand something is if you have to teach it, because then you really have to understand it. In this process, we’re learning so much about how WordPress works and how you develop with WordPress, and helping to bring that information and that learning back to docs and through other folks in the community. It’s this really cool cycle of improvement, which has been, I think, for Cynthia and myself, really, really rewarding.

00:24:36 – Reyes Martínez 
That’s indeed a great point. And I believe there’s an open call for contributors. Is that correct?

00:24:44 – Jonathan Bossenger
That is correct.

00:24:44 – Reyes Martínez
For the Intermediate Plugin Developer learning pathway.

00:24:48 – Jonathan Bossenger
Yes, so the Intermediate Plugin Developer is essentially the next learning pathway we want to work on. The way we laid out, and if you want, I can talk about development and development courses for the rest of time, so stop me if this gets boring, but with the developer learning pathways, we sort of laid out beginner developer foundational work, and then we thought about, okay, the next sort of logical step once you start developing in WordPress is you kind of make a choice between theme or plugin, depending on your use case or requirements, you know, where your interest lies.

So that’s why we split it off to intermediate theme, intermediate plugin. So theme is now done because we figured that was the most important one to do first. Plugin is next. And plugin is quite few more lessons, because there’s almost quite a lot more that you could do with plugins, a lot more interactions and implementations and things like that. And I worked out that based on an average output rate of 2.5 lessons a week, which is roughly what I can do on my own, if I were to work on this on my own with no other support, it would take the rest of this year. And that’s not cool. So I put out a call for folks to come and join me. I’m hoping to get the plugin community.

We’ve cross-posted to the Plugin Review team. So anybody who has an interest in developing plugins, who has an interest in teaching others about developing plugins, who can help us research and write scripts, who can help us with voice recordings. So sometimes we’ll do a cool thing where somebody will do the research and script writing and somebody else will record the voice and then someone else will take the voice and put the video together. Or someone will just, you know, do the whole thing. So we’ve got all of these different opportunities where folks could come along. Or just reviewing, you know, reviewing our scripts, reviewing our final videos, making sure that the content is valid, correct, and showing the best of what is possible with plugin development.

There is the call for contributors. It’s on the training team site. And then there’s also If you go to our GitHub repository, there is an issue I’ve pinned at the top of the issues list for intermediate plugin developer, and that’s where you can comment and say, yes, I want to get involved and we can start connecting there.

00:26:54 – Reyes Martínez 
Awesome. Thanks for sharing. Glad to hear there are plenty of contributing opportunities there. Javier, I saw you shared a question, would you like to unmute and share it yourself?

00:27:08 – Javier Casares 
Okay. So the first one, I think both have been in some topics in some conversations. The first one, I don’t know if now it’s working, but is it showing when, if I’m not… When you finish a lesson or a tutorial or something, there is like something, somewhere that shows that you did that tutorial. Is that showing anywhere? Because I know you can see that in Learn WordPress, but it’s shown in I don’t know, in your profile or someplace?

00:28:03 – Kathryn Presner 
Yes.

00:28:04 – Javier Casares 
Okay.

00:28:04 – Kathryn Presner 
I actually had this already open, so I’ll just show you. It is shown on your profile in your activity.

00:28:14 – Javier Casares 
Okay, in the activity, but…

00:28:14 – Kathryn Presner 
That’s what it is for now. If somebody feels like there should be more to this, like a badge…

00:28:27 – Javier Casares 
More, like maybe, under the activity tab. For example, there are the photos, the plugins, because the activity disappears when you did some things.

00:28:44 – Jonathan Bossenger 
So if I could interrupt this. That is actually a conversation that we have had with, I think, the Meta team. I can’t remember. I think it was in GitHub somewhere. I can go and find the GitHub issue once we finish chatting about this. But we have had a conversation. I seem to remember even using my inspector, inspector tools, developer tools to like quickly hard code one and sort of show it. And the idea was to have it as its own Learn tab, you know, so where it’s like plugins, and there’s a couple others I can’t remember what they are. But you have one for Learn and then that would list your completed courses or your lessons that you’ve taken, whatever. So that is part of the plan.

I think I think it’s a conversation that, because we don’t have control over the profiles, it’s a conversation we need to have with Meta. So it is definitely something we want to do, but our focus was on getting the new site going and then that sort of part of the next phase. So that is definitely a conversation that has been had. I’ll find that issue of that conversation and see if I can share it while we’re doing this.

00:29:45 – Javier Casares 
Okay. No, the main reason is because the activity disappears. So if you want to see if that person did some tutorials, you need a place to see that. And that’s my second question. Another old question about this. Is there any idea to have an official certification from the community or something?

00:30:17 – Kathryn Presner 
So certifications have been a long conversation, and I’ll even link to a post from 2022. It’s a big topic, and I think there have been a lot of discussions about the pros and cons of having certifications, the difficulty in establishing a certification program.

And like Jonathan said, the focus was on getting the site up and running. And then we can pick up some of these conversations because clearly, some folks really want certifications. And whether that’s something that’ll happen, I’m not sure, because like Jonathan said, that’s also a wider conversation that has to happen. But certainly, it comes up a lot. And I think now that the site is out, we can pick up some of those conversations and see where they go.

00:31:06 – Javier Casares 
Maybe a first step…

00:31:09 – Jonathan Bossenger 
Sorry if I could just. Sorry, I want to quickly add to that because this is something that I am very opinionated of. So this is my opinion as Jonathan Bossenger, not the WordPress community, not the company that I work for. But those of you in this room might remember there was a company a number of years ago, last year or some time, that released their own certification and it was covered on WP Tavern.

And I remember some of the comments on that Tavern post, and one of the comments was, and this is nothing against that company, I’m not bringing this up to say anything against them, but one of the comments by a community member in that Tavern post was, if I fix all the bugs on their website, does that automatically mean I get the certification? And to me, what that points to is that as a community, we need to first agree what is required to get that certification. Now, we have some idea of how to get there. We’re busy creating this content. It’s a community effort. So I think we’re all kind of agreeing that having this content is good. The community is reviewing it. The community is giving us feedback. I recently had a piece of feedback on one of my lessons about something that I showed that could have been done a better way, and I’m busy recording an update for that.

So once we have that foundation, once we have those courses out there that the community agrees on these courses are good, then I think we can have that conversation about certifications, because then the community agrees this content is good. The process of going through this content, learning this content, doing the practical examples, exams, whatever we have together, means that the person who’s completed this content knows what they’re talking about, then we can have certifications, I feel. And so I feel like this work that we’re doing now is laying the foundation of that.

And as Kathryn shared, we’ve had this discussion as a training team many, many, many times. And this project, this process of creating these learning pathways is very much part of it. But as a community, I don’t think we’re ready yet to say this content. I could tell you that this content is right, because I created it. But somebody else might say, no, what you’ve done here is wrong. We need to tweak this. We need to tweak that. So there needs to be a little bit of time for the community. And I would love, and I’m going to make this open call, seeing as I’ve got the media call here, every single WordPress developer out there, come and take the course, come and tell me what I’m doing wrong. So we can make it better. So we can make it right. So that when anybody takes it, we all know, we all agree that this is the best content for these people to learn from. Excuse me. And then we can certify.

00:33:36 – Javier Casares 
Okay.

00:33:39 – Reyes Martínez 
Thanks, Javier, for asking. I think conversations around certifications can go on for a long time. I know, I know. It’s a big topic, yeah. And I know there are some known challenges as well.

00:33:53 – Reyes Martínez 
Jonathan, you raised your hand again or… okay, I don’t know if you wanted to share something else. I just wanted to share or ask you also where people can learn more about Learn WordPress and the Learning Pathways project? Kathryn, maybe you can share…

00:34:13 – Kathryn Presner 
Sure. Well, I think you might have shared it in the chat before, but there is a post if you’re talking about the new site and learning pathways on the new site. I wrote an introductory post here, but is that what you meant or did you mean something else?

00:34:31 – Reyes Martínez 
Yeah, let me share some of those links. And I believe you hosted an online workshop yesterday and you’re hosting another one tomorrow. Is that correct?

00:34:41 – Kathryn Presner 
Yes. Yes, exactly. So we had one yesterday. Jonathan and I hosted a workshop about the new site. We recorded it. It’s up on WordPress.tv, I will grab the link. And then we’re having another one tomorrow. So that’s a tomorrow will be with Wes Theron, who’s another content creator. And yeah, we walk through the new site live. Oh, thank you for grabbing the link. And here’s the recording of yesterday’s. And yeah, it’s a tour of the new site in greater depth than we’ve done here, let’s say. And we also had the certifications question yesterday. So obviously, that’s going to keep coming up. But it’s good. It’s good for us to talk about it and get the conversation going again. So yeah, that would be another place to check out.

00:35:26 – Reyes Martínez 
Definitely. I know Ben also gave a talk at WordCamp Europe for those folks interested in getting a little bit more background about the Learn WordPress platform as well. I’m going to share the link in the chat as well. And there was an episode in the WordPress Briefing podcast as well with Wes, I believe, touching on the learning pathways. So all of those are great resources to get some more context. Okay.

00:36:04 – Reyes Martínez 
And I think, I don’t know folks if you want to share anything else about the new Learn WordPress launch, any other resources?

00:36:14 – Kathryn Presner 
I can take this question from Javier, if you want.

00:36:19 – Reyes Martínez 
Oh, yeah, sure.

00:36:22 – Kathryn Presner 
So very good question about multilingual capability. I will share my screen and show you what we have now. So we have had volunteers translating over time. So not just for the launch, but over time, some of the lessons, some of the courses. And so you can toggle the language to see what’s available. We need more folks to help translate, and also we need a better multilingual solution. So right now, if you click on, you know, Italiano, you’ll see the courses in Italian. These are some community courses. But this isn’t a true multilingual solution, obviously. This is sort of what could be done at the time.

However, going forward, we want a better multilingual solution. And so we are testing a multilingual plugin, which is TranslatePress. Now, the Meta team ran into some technical issues with TranslatePress. There were some issues with that plugin, using it at scale like this. There were some performance issues. The TranslatePress team said they would fix them. And so now, again, now that the site is launched and we’ve got the base up and running, we’re picking that up again, and hopefully we’ll be able to implement that and have a full multilingual solution. Because the way of copying content right now is not ideal. It’s a cumbersome process and it’s not ideal, as anyone who’s ever built a multilingual site knows. You need a good system. And so TranslatePress tested well, it’s just that there are some scalability issues with it. So stay tuned.

00:38:09 – Reyes Martínez 
Thanks, Kathryn, for answering.

00:38:19 – Jonathan Bossenger 
We do have a process in place to start translating the content, even though the plugin is not working. So again, call for contributors. If you speak a different language to English, I speak Afrikaans, which is useless to the rest of the world. So I can’t translate anything. But if you speak another language and you can translate the content, that would be amazing, because I would love to see all of our content translated for everyone. So if you want to translate, you can start. And then once we get the solution in place, then we can implement it.

00:38:44 – Javier Casares
Okay.

00:38:47 – Reyes Martínez 
Thank you. Okay, I was saying that I want to be mindful of people’s time. So, if there are no further questions, I believe we can move on to the next agenda item. I’m also curious, because we are approaching the hour, I’m also curious to know if you folks prefer or want to hear about showcase entries, or do you prefer to jump directly into the open floor?

00:39:23 – Reyes Martínez 
I see, Rae, you are… Did I pronounce it correctly as well? Rae? Okay. Yeah, maybe then I can share… Oh, question. Rae, you can go ahead as well and unmute, yeah.

00:39:40 – Rae Morey 
Hi, everyone. I was wondering how many people are working on creating, how many contributors are working on creating content for Learn WordPress? If there’s a small team, if there’s lots of people, I mean, because there’s a lot of content to create, you know, with one course having 59 lessons, and that’s very time-consuming. So I’m just interested in the workload as well.

00:40:05 – Jonathan Bossenger 
Hmm, Kathryn, do you feel like answering that one? Should I take it? Cynthia?

00:40:08 – Kathryn Presner 
Yeah, I’m trying to look up the stat for July.

00:40:12 – Jonathan Bossenger 
I can talk, but I don’t want to be the Misha.

00:40:15 – Kathryn Presner 
Well, go ahead and talk. Meantime, I’m looking up the number for July specifically.

00:40:22 – Jonathan Bossenger 
Sure. So what I do know is there are a small number of what we’re calling content creators. So Kathryn, sorry, Cynthia is a content creator. I don’t know why my hand is up. Maybe Sue was picking up my hand, but I didn’t physically do it. Cynthia is a content creator. I’m a content creator. Wes is a content creator. What we mean by that is somebody who takes a lesson idea, a description, with an objective, sometimes not even an objective, maybe some links, and does the whole thing start to finish. So at the moment there’s about four or five of us that are, you know, we create the whole thing start to finish.

Then there are a number of folks who are just creating the video part. So we somebody I remember who met with some folks from I think it’s Hostinger, they’ve got some video editors. They’re not great at the research and script writing part, but they’re great at taking a voice recording and a script and then putting some video together. So we have two team members from Hostinger that are contributing a number of hours per week towards that. We have a big pool of reviewers. So we have a number of reviewers in the team. I would say easily 15 reviewers that review the content quite regularly. And then we also have a number of script writers. So again, it’s a small number. There’s about three or four of those. They just do research and script writing.

And I want to highlight Ronny Shani there. She’s done some amazing work with us. And I’m sure I see other people putting thumbs up. Ronny’s all over the place. She does amazing things. But she’s helped with a lot of research and script writing, especially for the developer-focused things. She’s not comfortable having her voice recorded or doing the video, but she’s very good at doing that. So I would say on the whole, the whole team team, if we include the reviewers, is probably 20 to 25. That excludes anybody translating content, that’s just creating the original English content. But then that’s broken down by different roles and what folks are capable of doing. Obviously, creating content requires you to be comfortable recording your voice as you can hear, I’m very comfortable doing that, comfortable with a video editing tool, putting these things together. And that’s why we’ve tried to sort of open up the sausage factory and make it easy to break these tasks up a little bit so that we can include other contributors. So that’s why in my call for contributors post, I’m saying if you are interested in any of those sort of five areas, please come and join us because the more the merrier.

00:42:47 – Kathryn Presner 
Thanks, Jonathan. And in the meantime, I popped the stat in the chat. But in July, we had six content creators. That’s folks creating videos, scripts, voiceovers, editing, and all that types of work. And then we had three people who created localized content. So that was in two different languages.

That gives you some idea. And I don’t think that was out of the ordinary. It’s not an average, but that’s a sample month.

00:43:21 – Reyes Martínez 
Thank you. Thank you both for answering that. Okay. Any other lingering questions?

00:43:35 – Reyes Martínez 
It feels, it looks like we can move on to the next item. Again, I don’t know… how do you feel about going quickly through some of the latest showcase entries? Is that okay for everyone? Yeah?

Okay, I guess these sessions always take longer than expected. A lot of things to talk about and discuss. Okay, so again, let me share some links for reference in the chat.

00:44:16 – Reyes Martínez
I’ll try to cover these very quickly. One of the first entries I shared is Freethink. Freethink is a digital media company dedicated to sharing stories of people and groundbreaking technologies.

They have a modern website design that draws visitors into a dynamic mix of content including long form written pieces and videos, and they leverage WordPress scalability and design is built on WordPress, WordPress VIP. It’s a really cool site and a large publication. So here’s the link to the showcase.

And the next on the list is Spotify’s official newsroom, For the Record, which leans on WordPress publishing capabilities and the flexibility of custom blocks. They deliver a wide range of content about the company, its technology, and cultural and musical trends. And, oh, the Spotify entry, we don’t know, or at least I don’t have any other information about who designed the site. But if you’re interested, I can try to just learn a little bit more about this entry and try to figure it out or see if we can learn more about the designer who’s behind that site.

00:45:56 – Reyes Martínez 
I was reading some of the chat messages. Perfect. And next on the list, we have Disney General Entertainment Press. This site focuses on Disney’s television brands and is built to communicate updates across its creative properties.

Using WordPress, the DGE press team streamlined the editorial process, content distribution, and updates for 8000 press members. You can learn more about these and other enterprise success stories in the enterprise WordPress showcase shared by the Scale Consortium group. I know this is a brand this group works with. So yeah, I highly recommend checking that Scale Consortium link if you want to read about some other cool success stories.

And other entries include be beau, a French design agency; Digitalists, a digital marketing agency from Austria; and Studio Enabloo, a design and production studio headquartered in Africa. They are all great examples of modern sites that leverage WordPress flexibility to create some unique and branded experiences. So all of these are pretty cool sites and those are links in case you want to check those out. If you want any more any other information about them, feel free to reach out and I can try to learn or yeah learn a little bit more about who are the designers behind them. I know a few folks from those sites, others we don’t know so many information so much information, but yeah.

00:47:53 – Reyes Martínez
And finally, I would just like to remind everyone that the State of Enterprise WordPress 2024 survey is now open and looking for feedback from enterprise organizations. So, if you know any enterprise brands using WordPress, please encourage them to provide their input to help advance the enterprise WordPress space. I think that’s all.

Question, Javier: Is there a way to filterFilter Filters are one of the two types of Hooks https://codex.wordpress.org/Plugin_API/Hooks. They provide a way for functions to modify data of other functions. They are the counterpart to Actions. Unlike Actions, filters are meant to work in an isolated manner, and should never have side effects such as affecting global variables and output. by country? In the showcase page, do you mean? I don’t know if there’s actually…

00:48:30 – Javier Casares 
I cannot find… If there is a way, I cannot find that. I see that there is like a place where it says country, whatever, but there is no filter for… Or I cannot find the filter, but…

00:48:48 – Reyes Martínez 
Yeah, that’s interesting. I don’t know right now if there is a…

00:48:52 – Javier Casares 
Maybe we need to open a ticket.

00:48:57 – Reyes Martínez 
I don’t think there’s a current filter by country. But yeah, that would be interesting.

00:49:00 – Javier Casares 
Some time ago, we talked in the Spanish community to have like some directory for meetups or whatever, focused on Spain. It should be interesting to have one place where you can put Spain and see everything there but I cannot find that so. I will try to open a ticket, an issue somewhere. I don’t know where the showcase is now. It’s in some repo in GitHub.

00:49:34 – Reyes Martínez 
Yeah, I believe there’s a repo for the WordPress.org website. I can follow up with you on that if I find the right repo where you can share your suggestion. But I agree that that’s interesting.

00:49:55 – Reyes Martínez 
Okay, if there are no more questions on that, I believe we can move on to a little bit of discussion. I guess there’s not a lot of time. I mean, I’m okay with going for a little bit over an hour, but again, I just want to be mindful of everyone’s time.

00:50:18 – Reyes Martínez 
Let’s open the floor for any other topics about the Media Corps project. I noted some potential conversations that I had in mind, but I would like to first hear if you have any specific questions or topics that you would like to discuss. If so, please feel free to unmute or share them in the chat.

00:50:51 – Reyes Martínez 
It’s quiet here. Okay. Rae. Any updates on the progress of the Media Corps experiment? What do you mean like progress? Or any update on the progress? I would love it if you could elaborate a little bit more on that to ensure I understand it correctly.

00:51:16 – Rae Morey 
Yeah, I just mean, I guess, what’s the general sentiment around how it’s going, I guess, for your team as well and from leadership? And is there a timeline for looking back at the progress and measuring it and deciding on whether it’s been successful or not?

00:51:36 – Reyes Martínez 
Yeah, that’s a great question. So I think I think progress, well, I think we are just starting. I mean, maybe it feels like ages since we announced the first idea, but we are really starting the project. The latest feedback form that we shared, I believe, in general, I mean, I think feedback was positive. Of course, I think there’s room to address or keep improving based on media folks’ feedback. But I feel right now the general sentiment is positive. And there’s a lot of I think we are still learning as we go like there are no like set processes yet. I think we are just learning and the experimental project I know there are a few folks who maybe don’t like to call this experiment but I think it’s actually a kind of… it’s an experiment.

And the timeline we set for or to just see if this could be successful is December. So I think by the end of the year, we’ll be able to maybe look back at the past six months and, you know, like, just evaluate some of the feedback, some of the insights received and to see, you know, how this has been going, what’s the feedback received, and we can recommend or suggest any direction or another one. So, yeah. I don’t know if… does this answer your question?

00:53:22 – Rae Morey
Yeah.

00:53:30 – Reyes Martínez 
Also, in the meantime, I don’t know, in case you are also thinking about any other questions, I also wanted to touch a little bit on the Media Corps and the Uniting WordPress YouTubers efforts. Because I don’t know if folks have all the context and background. But on July 3rd, Anne, Anne McCarthy hosted a call with some WordPress YouTubers to get to know each other and chat about pain points, content planning, and other ways to stay in touch. And if I’m not mistaken, she’ll be hosting another call later this month. So, I feel there has been some confusion, maybe around, like, Media Corps and Anne’s efforts. So I thought I would try to help clarify those initiatives and to help manage expectations and any potential confusion.

For those who are not or haven’t heard about Anne’s efforts, I believe they try to or they aim to provide accurate and like relevant product information. Also leveraging actually the WordPress Media Corps project, but they also aim to help create a feedback loopLoop The Loop is PHP code used by WordPress to display posts. Using The Loop, WordPress processes each post to be displayed on the current page, and formats it according to how it matches specified criteria within The Loop tags. Any HTML or PHP code in the Loop will be processed on each post. https://codex.wordpress.org/The_Loop. where YouTubers creators can share their feedback and insights from the audiences back into the project.

And lastly, I think Anne is also aiming to build a community where these creators can exchange tips, tricks, or any other best practices to support each other. So I think in comparison to the Media Corps, or at least regarding the Media Corps project, what we aim is to cover a broad range of WordPress updates in briefings, so not just limited to product releases or technical development topics.

00:55:33 – Reyes Martínez 
We also expect media partners to regularly attend or watch briefings and share feedback to help shape the upcoming briefings and the project implementation. So I see, or at least from my perspective, I see that Anne’s efforts might be more suitable for YouTubers or content creators who want to maybe share product feedback or stay closely informed about core, Gutenberg, and other related discussions. But again, this is not, by the way, I mean, these efforts are also compatible, it doesn’t mean that you have to be in one or the other one. But it is that I thought, I don’t know, like sharing some of this context would help especially clarify, I don’t know, these efforts. So hopefully, this helps avoid some confusion. But yeah, that’s my perspective.

00:56:44 – Reyes Martínez 
Any other questions, thoughts?

00:56:57 – Reyes Martínez 
Yeah, go ahead, Rae.

00:56:59 – Rae Morey 
Couldn’t find the hand-raising icon, so I’ll just skip. So, it’s interesting that you talk about that because that was actually going to be one of my next questions. Obviously, there’s been some criticism from YouTubers in recent weeks about WordPress, Gutenberg, the release of WordPress 6.6. I guess, how is leadership handling that? Is that something that Anne is taking care of? Is that something that, I guess, what is the feedback from leadership around that kind of criticism that’s happening?

00:57:39 – Reyes Martínez 
I don’t have any feedback from project leadership. I honestly feel that it’s really hard, I mean, to just keep track of everything that is shared out there. I think even I know contributors, like Anne and other core contributorsCore Contributors Core contributors are those who have worked on a release of WordPress, by creating the functions or finding and patching bugs. These contributions are done through Trac. https://core.trac.wordpress.org., I know they try to stay, like, updated on the feedback shared out there, but I think it’s really, really hard to just keep track of all the feedback and thoughts, opinions that are shared out there daily.

I don’t even know if sometimes or some of those videos sometimes are even, I mean, if project leadership knows about those videos or feedback. I know, you know, like there, for example, one of the things that Anne also hopes with this initiative is to actually try to improve the feedback loop because right now, I think it’s kind of hard for everyone to know what’s being shared because there are so many different places to share input or feature requests, suggestions. It’s all kind of distributed across many different places. I think it’s really hard to just keep track of everything that is shared out there. I think that’s also the idea regarding… like improving the feedback loop. But yeah, I can’t share again, I don’t know any thoughts or input from project leadership on that.

00:59:42 – Reyes Martínez 
Okay. I know we… I mean, I do have more topics that I would like to discuss, but I know we are, I see we’re a little over an hour already. So, yeah, I think we can wrap up our discussion for today if there are no other thoughts, questions.

And I think we covered a lot of ground and we can keep conversations going on 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/., GitHub, for any questions or topics that we would like to further discuss. And of course, if there’s interest, we can always consider scheduling a discussion call, not just a briefing, but I mean like more of a discussion call.

01:00:37- Reyes Martínez
So yeah. All right. So yeah, I guess we can officially wrap this up. Thank you all for your contributions and for sharing your thoughts. And thank you, Kathryn, Cynthia, and Jonathan for sharing your insights about the new Learn WordPress experience with us.

As a reminder, the recap and recording of this session will be shared on the Media Corps blog. In the following days, and the video will be also uploaded to the WordPress YouTube channel.

If you have any further questions or need any additional information, please feel free to reach out on Slack.

01:01:26 – Reyes Martínez 
Thank you, everyone. And have a great day, afternoon. And yeah, thank you. Thank you all again for your time.

01:01:34 – Jonathan Bossenger 
Thank you. Thank you, guys.