WordPress Training Team’s Big Changes: Learning Pathways ...

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The WordPress Training Team’s Big Changes: Learning Pathways and Website Redesign


Brian Coords has written a new article: https://wptavern.com/the-wordpress-trai ... e-redesign

Knowledge and training for WordPress has traditionally been very decentralized. There’s the official documentation, the developer documentation, the support forums, WordPress.tv, and then the wide array of community blogs, tutorials, and YouTube videos. Resources like documentation and support forums exist to answer questions and explain features, but their purpose is not to teach a person what it means to use WordPress. That’s the goal of Learn WordPress, managed by the WordPress Training team and living at the easy-to-remember URL learn.wordpress.org.

Learn WordPress has existed in some form for the last decade, but the current iteration was launched by the training team in 2020, with free workshops and courses offering guided instruction through a number of topics, from basic site customization to block development. Now that three more years of educational content has been published, the team has been revisiting the structure of the website itself.

“Let’s be honest, if you hit the Learn WordPress home now, finding the right information for your specific needs isn’t the most intuitive process.”

That’s Jonathan Bossenger, a Developer Educator sponsored by Automattic. He’s actively involved in Learning Pathways, a new initiative launched last fall to address some of these architectural problems by July 2024. We spoke about his team’s goals with this new project.

What is a Learning Pathway?
“The Learning Pathways,” he explained, “are trying to solve [this problem]: allowing folks who come to Learn WordPress to find the specific content they need, whether they are brand new to WordPress, or have some experience and want to take that experience to whatever the next logical level is for them.”
Currently, content on the Learn site is organized more like a blog: it shows the newest content first, roughly categorized by concept. To help users find what they need, the new pathways will more effectively categorize courses based on three different types of learners: Users, Developers, and Designers. Then the content for each user type is organized by skill level, starting with Beginner, moving through Intermediate, and then Expert.

“Under the hood,” Jonathan explained, “the learning pathways are essentially courses, they use the same custom data types and quiz/activity functionality that courses currently do. But they are bigger, more encompassing courses, each with multiple modules that have a specific focus, containing one or more lessons to achieve the learning outcomes of that focus.”
So a developer or a designer coming into WordPress could look at their learning pathway and determine where they want to start: are they a Beginner or are they ready to level up their Advanced skills? Not all of the content has not been created yet, but existing courses are being repurposed and used as the foundation for pathways.

Curating Content for Modern WordPress
As a developer who has learned WordPress over the last decade, one concern I had was the sheer amount of knowledge you might need to grapple with. Just from the development side, there’s PHP, JavaScript, React, and dozens of APIs for everything from adding new settings to interacting with the database.

“Believe me, as the person spearheading the developer learning pathways, even I was surprised how much there is to dive into,” Jonathan added. “So for me personally, I’m a big fan of building a solid foundation, and then building on top of that. I’m pretty happy about how the beginner developer learning pathway has turned out, but I can see the future learning pathways we create on top of that being kind of fluid.”
This opens the question of just how the team is handling the transition of WordPress through its Gutenberg era, and whether they’re creating content for “Classic” features like shortcodes and widget areas.
“The factor that we are always keeping in mind is that we build those pathways to be about WordPress of today and the future,” he said, “not WordPress of the past. So while legacy APIs like the Shortcode API are useful to know about, it’s more important to teach someone about something like the REST API first, because that’s a big part of how WordPress works today, and probably for the future.”


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Brian Coords has written a new article: https://wptavern.com/the-wordpress-trai ... e-redesign
the Training team and living at the easy-to-remember URL learn.wordpress.org.