 The people are going to get you ready for the Goot and Pocalypse. I don't know what that means, but they do, and that's why they're speaking on it. So perk up, get whatever leftover coffee there is. Splash some water on your face to avoid your laptops, and take away. Thank you very much, Corey. We are right after snack time and after lunch, so hopefully everybody's still with us. My name is Jen McFarland. This is my colleague, Brian DeConnick. I'm going to let him introduce himself by way of the next slide, Brian DeConnick. So I insisted on this slide because it's fundamental for understanding this presentation, some important definitions. The first definition is portmanteau. It's a word that describes a word whose form is a combination of two other words, and so the form and the definition of the new portmanteau word is based on combining those two things. So for instance, breakfast and lunch become brunch, smoke and fog become smoke. And that's important because there's this other term called portmanteau, popularized by Helen Zaltzman on the Ellusionist podcast, which is a portmanteau that you should feel ashamed of, like romance, or adjutainment, or everything we're going to say in this presentation, like gluten-pocalypse, and gluten-ready, and gluten-troduction, and all the other words that we're going to use today. So we know, don't boo us, and maybe even embrace it yourself. Come up with your own gluten-terrible ideas. Yeah, hopefully you know this because you're here, and our topic title is gluten-ready for the gluten-pocalypse. Also, Miles, as a resume, actually said he is a lover of puns, and we hired him anyway, so we brought this on ourselves. So literally, this presentation is going to be about us, a little bit of land of NC State. We're going to go back in time to when the gluten shit got gluten-real. And then we're going to talk a little bit about the user testing that we've done on campus to help inform the decisions that we're making, getting folks on board, and the gluten training that we've developed, Gutenberg training. He's doing it. He's making it do it. Cleaning and scheduling our transition, and then we really are gluten-excited, even though that sounds terrible. Also, you should know that we really like stormtroopers. We feel that they are maligned, and they have a whole other life outside of Star Wars, where they're not shooting the rebellion. So we're going to represent them a little bit here. About NC State, we are located here. You are on our campus. Welcome to NC State. We're a land grant institution established in 1887. We have a lot of students, a lot of faculty, a lot of staff. Specifically, we have 11 programs and the graduate school. Go pack. Also, this is a big representation of campus up here in the cheap seats to make fun of us. About OIT design and web services, we are part of Central IT, the Office of Information Technology. We wear a lot of hats being in Central IT. So some of the things that we're responsible for, we maintain several of the major campus WordPress multi-site environments. And that includes our WordPress blog environment, which is open to all faculty, staff, and students to make a blog site for free. We have our hosted WordPress environment. We have student orgs. We also build themes and plugins that are generally available for campus to use in those environments. We support the themes and plugins. We don't support all of the environments on campus. But we do do custom web design, development, support, training, all kinds of other work for folks who live on campus, who are housed on campus in some way. So we stay busy. I'm very delightful. We really are. This is Miles and Lauren up front. And this is Brian. You should know that Brian works remote in Boston. So you are very lucky to have Brian here in person today. Yeah, Brian. He's like, don't applaud, don't applaud. I'm not that special. OK, so a little bit about higher education. It's certainly a unique situation. A lot of you are in private industry. And higher ed is quirky in a lot of ways. We love NC State, but it is a big institution. There's a lot of moving parts. The term you hear a lot is silos, especially in NC State. There's a lot of individual groups that don't necessarily talk to each other very well. And WordPress is good for that because it lets people install WordPress and do their own thing. But we've sort of managed to get a kind of web infrastructure where we can develop things in WordPress in different groups, can use that in different ways or not. Change is always going to be scary, but I will say it's especially scary at an institution of this size. And if you've worked in higher ed or helped out with higher ed or been in higher ed, you might know that there's a lot of denial about change. So processes can be slow. And that's a concern for us as well. So the lay of our land is that we have lots of great developers doing lots of great work. See earlier reference up here. We love these folks. But we do think that central IT is special in a couple of unique ways. One is because we are central IT, we are enabled to help the rest of campus, to help all of campus. Our priority is to serve the entire university and the mission of the university. And that means that sometimes we work on things that don't help us at all, but help everybody else. And by extension help outside of campus. And so we very much work with the mindset of what we build for ourselves should be useful for everyone. Our mission statement in OIT specifically lays that out. That we should be working on collaborative IT services, solutions, and strategies that assist the university, state, and nation. And it is those kinds of things that we keep in mind. Despite the fact that we're a four person team, already operating capacity, already stressed. And the last thing we need is a big old Gutenberg mess dropped in the middle of us. That's going to require cross-functional cooperative development, training, support, all that other stuff. Yeah, it's a pain. But it's definitely something that we know we need to be doing, and we need to be doing well that benefits all of campus. And by extension, you guys. And that's why we're here. All right, so I'm going to talk a little bit about when things became real for us with the whole Gutenberg adventure. We're all about Gutenberg. He doesn't curse as much as me. Well, so we'll see about that. So if you came to work, did anybody come to WordCamp Raleigh last year? All right, does anybody remember going to my talk at WordCamp Raleigh last year? All right, we got one person, two people, all right. I like you people. You're my favorites. So if you came to WordCamp Raleigh last year, you saw me talk about our big, fancy, exciting short code strategy, cutting edge stuff, short codes. We were so excited about this plug-in, this helper plug-in called Shortcake, which lets you take short codes that have been in WordPress for a very long time and give them a nice user interface for creating the short codes in context in the editor and gives you a preview in the editor. And I really like that presentation. I had a really good time doing it. At the end of the talk, I talked a little bit about how Gutenberg is going to change WordPress and what that looks like in the context of the short code work we were doing. And here's what I said toward the end of that talk. Let's hope the volume works. Cue it as to WordPress TV. The first thing is that big changes to WordPress take time. Shortcake solves problems right now. No one at Gutenberg is going to be part of WordPress. It took a really long time for us to get that REST API. All right, that's enough of that. So I stand by every one of those words because it did take us a long time to get that REST API. It was like four years or something like that. And big changes do typically take time. I don't think I anticipated the level of commitment that the community has to trying to push Gutenberg and make it a thing that's really happening. So yeah, so that's where we were this time last year. We thought Gutenberg was something that was like a five-year trajectory, something like that, something that we'd still, we would have a long time to really get our hands on. Then I went to WordCamp US in Nashville this past December and I attended Matt Mullenweg's State of the Word where they did a live demo of Gutenberg as it existed at that point and Matt Mullenweg said that he thought Gutenberg would be ready in April of 2018. And right there, as he said it, I sent John a message and Slack from my phone. I said, oh darn, Matt Mullenweg says he thinks Gutenberg will be ready and out for everyone in April. Spoiler alert, I didn't say darn because state employees sometimes use nasty words. I'm sorry if I shattered any illusions about this August institution that is NC State. We were kind of freaked out. It was like, oh man, everything is changing now. But you know what, it was okay. Everything is fine. Everything is okay because we knew about Gutenberg. We were paying attention. We were watching all the chatter in the WordPress world. We had installed it on a sandbox site. We had started to get the hang of what is this going to mean. We were already following block tutorials and it was okay. It was also not fine. And the reason it was not fine is because oh my goodness, Matt Mullenweg said April 2018. That's not very long. Spoiler alert, it's April 2018 and WordPress 5.0 has not been released. We'll talk about that in a little bit. But so in our early testing, Gutenberg did not seem fine. It seemed very buggy. There wasn't a lot of documentation out there. Compared to now where there's still not a ton of documentation, there was very, very little. And then we had a whole campus of people who had no idea that this was coming. Minus a few people here and there. And then on top of that, we have jobs that don't involve just sitting around waiting for major changes in WordPress. We have other things that we do. And so now we were looking at how are we going to make this adjustment? So we've sort of, I've sort of divided this into a couple of different things that Gutenberg means. First is the technical challenge. If you attended Miles and Lauren's talk earlier this afternoon, you may have heard them talk about how our development processes are changing to embrace JavaScript. That was a big change, less so for them, but more so for us. We have to start thinking about the changes we're making to the things that we already have built, themes and plugins. And really, we just can't get by anymore with a little PHP knowledge and a lot of Googling. There's also conceptual changes. So now instead of thinking in the ways of WordPress that we were thinking before, now we have to start thinking in blocks. Sometimes we joke about like dreaming in blocks and things like that. I have not. We have had dreams in blocks. You have? Yeah, oh yeah, didn't you say that? Oh yeah, that's right. Yeah, so dreaming in blocks. And rethinking how we build sites and develop plugins to fit into this Guten world that we're all heading into. And with that, thinking about the landscape in NC State and maybe opportunities for campus collaboration, and I'm looking at our friends right here, hi guys. And then finally, the organizational challenge of switching to Gutenberg, which is educating and helping to educate all of our campus developers, all of our colleagues who will also be building things on campus, training site administrators and content creators and also training IT support staff who are going to be getting the emails, the frantic, oh my God, WordPress just changed, what do I do? And developing the support materials to help support that, whether it's video tutorials or documentation, things like that. And we had to have all of this ready to go by the worst case scenario of April 1st, 2018. So it's April 28th, we're okay. But let's talk a little bit about why we're doing all of this and why we're diving into Gutenberg. Yeah, so there's certainly a case, I did not come up with this sub bullet, okay, look, early adoptenberg is just pushing the limits versus staying Guten free. And there's a lot of compelling reasons to stay Guten free. We had a short code plan, right? We talked about the short code plan, we've been presenting on the short code plan. Granted, Brian wrote this slide, but the short code plan was one we were all enthusiastic about. Why shouldn't we wait? Like we could certainly wait until Gutenberg's been released to see what it looks like, make sure that it's stable and then jump into it then. There's a case to be made for taking the time to learn and prepare. While it's being developed, that's a problem. As we've already alluded to, documentation is a little bit sparse, it can be difficult. And our campus is all over the place. There's not any single WordPress environment that's exactly like another. They're all over the place. Different people are managing different ones. And certainly we cannot make campus wide changes or mandates about how things should be implemented. So for us, there's ideas, there's some attractiveness to bearing your head in the sand which some people have asked about and some folks seem to be really dedicated to doing. And I can understand that, I really can. Plus it's hard, oh my gosh, it's so hard and time consuming and I'm tired, I have other stuff to do. Okay, but there's a lot of reasons to get into it. First of all, there's never a good time for a big catastrophic change like this. It's always gonna be busy, it's always gonna be hard. There's something to be said for taking control of it and fitting it in and having a little bit more time to prepare than you would maybe have if it was already here and you were staring it in the face. Learning and preparing for Gutenberg now means that hopefully we have a good sense of what we need to know when we dive into it, when we turn it on for somebody, we're more prepared for the kinds of things that we're gonna see. Ideally, it means that 2019 will be peaceful, maybe. Also for us, again, part of our mandate is to help the rest of campus and I do believe that getting into this is something that we are looked to sometimes as a resource for campus, often times, I think, hopefully. And we wanna make sure that we are up to speed on this. And also WordPress is an open source product and us being able to get into this has allowed us to provide meaningful feedback. We have several bug issues in the Gutenberg GitHub repo now that are being addressed and we're talking to them. However, we can help contribute back to the core community is something that we definitely wanna do. So this lets us be a resource and we don't get left behind and it's a win. It's a win, win, win. Now, we know that all of WordPress is not going to go Gutenberg the day that 5.0 drops, not even all of our sites. Probably not even like, it's like two of our sites will go live that day necessarily. You know, we might wait until like 5.01 or whatever. But it's a good idea to know that we have that choice when the time comes and allowing us to test this, make sure that Gutenberg is gonna work for all of our folks in the best possible way. But we know we need to be prepared to do this right. And part of that means knowing what to expect. All right, so I'm gonna start with a disclaimer. We did user testing in late January. Pre-release Gutenberg is a little bit of a moving target. They change things with every update and they've been updating about every two weeks. And so some of the things that we encountered have been fixed or have been improved. I've mostly left the things out that have been improved. If you are working with your own clients, if you work at a large organization, I 100% recommend doing your own user testing. Don't just take our word for it. I'll play LeVarbert and then say, you know, you don't have to take our word for it. And then you share the results with us. Yes, and share the results because we want to learn from you and also we don't, I mean, everybody talking to each other is beneficial. So we conducted user testing in late January, 2018 and we mostly focused on power users who already know WordPress. That's not exclusively, but that's who we decided to focus on for this testing. We gave them a 30 minute, nope, I'll be talking about that in just a minute. So we gave each of them a 30 minute exercise to learn the new editor and create content. And you can read all about what we did at that link right there. I wrote a blog post that's probably longer than it needed to be outlining everything we did and why. The question about power users, why test with power users? So we found that there's sort of two WordPress content creator types on campus. They're the people who use WordPress every day and they may not know every function of WordPress. They may not know any code, but they know where all the buttons are. They know how WordPress fits into their job because they're using it all the time. And then there are the infrequent WordPress users who might be an administrative assistant who only logs into WordPress when their boss says, hey, go change that thing on the website. They maybe have to relearn certain things every time they use WordPress because it's just not as much a part of their routine. So with that in mind, we decided to focus on power users because those are the people whose day-to-day jobs would be most impacted. And then in particular, we tried to select some power users who are frequently supporting those less WordPress-y users. So for instance, other IT staff who support other people in their colleges or in their units, people like that. So how many people here have tried Gutenberg? All right, that's a pretty good number. How many have seen Gutenberg in action? Yeah, okay. So we're not going to do a live demo of Gutenberg right now because we have a lot of content that we want to try to get through. But you can go to this link right here to give it a try real quick. You won't be able to save anything, but it'll be something that you can follow along a little bit as we do this if you'd like. That link doesn't go away and we're going to give it to you at the end again. So please don't spend all of your time right now playing with Gutenberg. Yeah, listen to what we have to say also. All right, so some of the things that we started noticing with our users as we were testing them. The first thing is that nobody knows what to call anything or where anything is. And that kind of makes sense with a new user interface, but it was really striking. So each block has this little three dot button right next to it that opens up a menu underneath. One of the quotes from our users who's testing, he says, I clicked on the little and then he pauses and he says, mini hamburger options thing. So it's struggling to find vocabulary to describe that. And again, power users who are using lots of web interfaces like this are probably going to recognize those three dots. They open up a menu. Whether or not others will, less power users, that's something that you're going to want to think about and we'll talk about in a moment. It's not always clear when to choose which block. So for example, we would give them a task like recreate this gray box with the text with the big T, right? And all right, so a lot of you have used Gutenberg. How many people think you use the quote block for this? All right, how many people think you use the pull quote block? All right, a few more. How many people think you use the paragraph block? All right, and how many people think you use the verse block? Smile. All right, so the correct answer is this is the paragraph block. This is just a paragraph block that's been restyled using some of the options that come built into Gutenberg. You could use it sort of functionally the way you would do a pull quote or something like that, but the pull quote is a different block. So this is exactly what that issue is. For a newcomer, for somebody who's not quite sure what they're doing in the new editor, the block names are descriptive but that doesn't always indicate what they should do next. And so really the thing we had to tell people is try a different block. Sometimes they would get stuck on trying to do one thing with the block that they had and we'd have to tell them, oh, yeah, move on to the next thing that you think might work. So for instance, we would give them the task of embedding a YouTube video in a page. And some people went straight to the image block, which makes a certain sense because a lot of the time we add media through the add media button and we mostly add images using the add media button. I see how those connections were made. Image block will not work. Some people went to the video block. 100% understand how you would think the video block would be used for a YouTube video. Not going to work because the video block is designed for local assets that are stored in your media library. Instead, you want to use the YouTube block, which is the YouTube embed block. There's not a lot of indication that that's the right choice. And so there's this intuition, this Guten tuition that you have to build up. Thank you, thank you everybody. This intuition that you have to build up to try to learn, this is where you go when you're looking for this, this is where you go when you're looking for that. Yes. You're going to embed in the YouTube embed? No, so the Vimeo block is a different block still. Right. But you put drop the link in the paragraph and the O embed works to convert the block. Right, the same way that O embed has worked in the existing editor. It's the same, I have feelings, let it go. So for people who maybe are less familiar with Gutenberg, there's this new thing when you're working with the block, there can be a sidebar on the right-hand side that gives you additional options, advanced block settings. Nobody that we tested, including Jen, nobody that we tested noticed that without getting a hint from the person who was running their test. That partly is because it's hidden by default. You have to go looking for it to open it up. And partly that's because the way we've been using WordPress all these years, we just don't think about content editing being something that's over in that right-hand sidebar. The right-hand sidebar is where you go to publish, the right-hand sidebar is where you go to add taxonomies, things like that. So this is a new concept in the new editor that you sort of have to get your head around. And then this gets back to something we were talking about before. This question of when do you need a new block type or when can you use those advanced settings to customize something? I have two paragraphs right here. They are both paragraph blocks. They've just used all these additional customization options to be styled very differently. This is a powerful new thing in Gutenberg. There's a lot of really cool stuff you can do. You just have to know where to look for it and when to do that. All about the Guten tuition. I'm gonna keep using that. One of the other things that we noticed with our testing is sometimes users had this issue of highlighting text and then going to the advanced block settings the way that you would highlight text and then click on the bold button or the tail size button. Spoiler alert, that's not how advanced block settings usually work. If you are changing the text size for a paragraph block for instance, it changes the text for the whole paragraph block rather than just what you've highlighted. This is again one of those intuition things you need to start to get it under your hands. How this changes that, how this changes that. That sort of thing. So yeah, so those are some of the big takeaways that we ran into. Having trouble with these functions of Gutenberg and honestly after about 20 minutes most of the users we tested got it. They did pretty okay. That doesn't mean they knew exactly where everything was. That didn't mean that they did the most efficient way of doing things but they basically got how it worked. The problem that we're facing for the campus is how many support tickets get generated from 20 minutes of trial and error for all of the users that we support. And so on our campus, Jen mentioned we have a blog environment that any student faculty or staff member can create a website in. That means we have 40,000 potential WordPress users. Thankfully not all 40,000 use WordPress every day but our worst case scenario would be turning this on and having. Did you do the math? I didn't do the math. I don't know but having hundreds or thousands of support tickets coming in, that's scary. That's changed your resume, scary. So the key takeaways are that you're going to use over and over again both for yourself, learning Gutenberg and for working with people who you're supporting. Don't forget to look over at the advanced settings on the right and try a different block. If it's not doing what you think you're doing just try a different block and build up that intuition. And so I mentioned earlier that we come back to this question of is testing power users the right idea? I think we had a sound reason for testing power users. What we encountered when we did test users who were less familiar with WordPress who didn't use it regularly, they had a lot more trouble than the people who were in it all the time. And that we were a little surprised about that because sometimes when you change something that people have formed habits around like power users they have a harder time adjusting whereas newcomers coming in fresh this is just how it's always been. Jen has this thought and I think there's something to it that those power users besides using WordPress are just more familiar with the digital user interfaces are more familiar with that those three dots might open up a menu. And people who are coming in less familiar with WordPress might also be people who are just less familiar with those kinds of UIs. And so Gutenberg has this beautiful clean user interface that has lots of iconography and not a lot of text but that introduces new struggles for people who are new to WordPress. And to just illustrate that here's the classic editor that we've all known for the last 12 years and there's a lot to this that we take for granted a lot of text where it says save draft and preview and tells you everything in text form all visible on the page. It's kind of a cluttered interface. But when you make the switch from this to Gutenberg there's just a lot less text on the screen for a newcomer to grab on to. The little eyeball button there is the preview button and in more recent versions of Gutenberg that's been replaced by an actual text preview button because if you don't know that that's the preview button click on the eyeball isn't something that occurs to most people. So. So this information was great and it helped us to inform what we needed to do next which was try to figure out how we were going to train campus not training campus. So this is a big change for those of you who don't know we've all been using this classic editor for about 12 years and we've gotten very accustomed to it we've taken it for granted we've maligned it in terrible ways with weird things like short codes and ACF and other things. And now we're sort of moving into yet another environment where users are gonna have to get used to something new and so how do we prepare them for this? And for us we were aware that to start with we were probably gonna have to overcome some amount of resistance. I will say that we haven't necessarily run into that quite as much as we expected so far. However at this point most of the people who are signing up and coming to class and sending us questions are self selecting as people who are interested in Gutenberg and want to make this change or you know they're aware of this they're working on it. Do we think that that will change some? Yeah sure there's faculty members there's everybody sorry not just faculty lots of people who don't like change and have really dug their heels in and they really just don't want to see something like this change for them especially if it's a big obstacle for them to learn something new they don't have time. So with that in mind I'm gonna pull out my little management tool book. This is one of those things that you may have seen before these are some of the concepts behind what it's gonna take to overcome resistance to change. And so this is something that we were kind of considering as we went through sort of in the back of our minds you have to have these three things before you're able to really convince people to make a change. One is dissatisfaction with the current state of things. You have to have a reason to think the change is important. Second you have to provide them with a vision of what's possible, what the change is gonna look like and why it's good and then also you have to give them some tangible meaningful first steps to making that change and seeing how it's going to benefit them. And so for us we decided to approach that kind of more focused on our three different primary audiences. One is our content creators, sort of the basic level day to day end users. Second is our site administrators. So those who are administering either a single site or a multi-site for us on campus. And then the third is our campus developers. So kind of much like WordPress tracks or former WordPress tracks, beginner, power user and developer kind of audiences. And so with that in mind we went into the process of trying to create some training and figure out how we were gonna talk to these folks. We determined that our content creators need to know, first of all, why WordPress is changing. It's really gonna not be clear to them. I mean, as far as their concern, it's a WYSIWYG editor, it's what's wrong with it since there's nothing, they need to know why they're gonna have to make this change, right? Second of all, what is changing is administrative options, appearance not changing, your media uploads not changing, your posts and pages, those are changing. So that's something that we're trying to clarify for people. And then also what are blocks and how are they good for me, why are they good for me? And so a couple of these harken back to like our motivation for change or overcoming the resistance to change. Obviously, we have to find a way to convince people that they are dissatisfied with the current state of things. So that's a big part of the training. And then giving them a vision of what blocks are and what is possible with blocks and why they're awesome. For our site admins, they need to know the same stuff but then they also need to be thinking about what are my options for upgrading? What does that process look like for my site? And then specifically with that in mind too, how is my theme gonna work with Gutenberg? Are there gonna be issues with that? What do I need to do to prepare for that? And that's a question that very much depends on their environment. And then finally for our developers, they're gonna be thinking about all those things but also if a theme's not working, what are my options? How do I fix it? What is the scenario there? Block templates, how many of you guys know what I'm talking about when I say block templates? I'm gonna detour a second into block templates. So one of the super awesome things to me about Gutenberg is that it will allow you to use blocks to build out a page template so that people can load a page and blocks will already exist on that page. You can have a page, for example, that's a directory that has a space for a name and for an email address and a CV and then a picture and it's all laid out, lined to the right image, all this other stuff, it's ready to go. If you want, you can lock that page down, they can't add any new blocks or you can choose to let them add new blocks or rotate them, move them around, that kind of thing. This is what WordPress always should have been. We've always been able to create new page content, new page types or post types but we haven't necessarily been able to actually build the structure to them and there was no, without a plugin, without some other tool to build onto that. This is gonna allow you to do that natively with blocks and it's a great idea and so it's something that I'm excited about. I don't know what the rest of my team is but I'm just like, woo, block template. So talking about that and then they know I do it all the time. How do I build my own custom blocks which obviously a lot of folks are really interested in? And so for those three audience, we wanted to make sure that we had a couple things. First of all, the ability to get some hands on experience, to give them hints and reminders so ongoing resources for them to be able to keep using this and remember how to use it and then some time to prepare, ideally more time and hey, Gutenberg's not here yet so they have more time. And again, going back to those earlier overcoming change, that hands-on experience is what's gonna give people those first steps, those first tangible actions in Gutenberg and the hints and reminders will help give them that vision of how they can use it and what's possible. And so with that in mind, we already sort of gave you this link but we have two environments that you can check out. One for campus only I'm afraid is our Gutenberg sandbox where you can build your own site that uses Gutenberg as the default editor so we allow folks on campus to build that site and if you have a campus ID, you can go and create one and it'll allow you to build posts and pages in Gutenberg and try it out. And then the other one, which we gave you the link to earlier and we'll provide again later is just a backend interface so you'll just go to the page, you'll be able to add blocks, you can't save the page but you can try out whatever blocks are available and see how it works and give it a good kick in the pants. And it's great for us for doing demos and workshops for explaining things to our clients and giving them a preview of what they're dealing with. So for us we focused directly on our developers with Guten Day, which was early March and we had about 35 attendees come and they were from both campus and a few folks off campus and we were able to spend all day. The morning was talking about our user testing and some of our experiences up to that point, some of our training and then in the afternoon we broke into segments to talk about development and planning and things like that. We shared pretty much everything we knew up to that point. We tried to do a crash course and react but apparently you have to have node installed before you can do that. So live demo was a tricky. We used that to help get the rest of campus excited about Gutenberg and specifically for us, again if you went to Miles and Lauren's talk you know that we're working on NC State blocks which is gonna be Gutenberg blocks specifically developed for NC State. So that was one of the things we were excited about. After Guten Day we started our workshops and we have these ongoing, we've already had five or six, yeah at least three I think of each. So we have Gutenberg for content creators and Gutenberg for site administrators and they have been very heavily attended which is great and we have resources for that as well. And then again with respect to hints and reminders we have lots of documentation on our website and you can see that at go.ntsu.edu slash Gutenberg. We're working on video tutorials and knowledge based articles again helping to have those resources in place when Gutenberg lands, especially for the rest of IT on campus. Links to external resources, the stuff that wordpress.org is putting out for Gutenberg and then our own blog posts about our personal experience and our journey, our journey, seriously. Anyway, we hope these are useful to folks. You are welcome to use them. So again, WordPress did not show up April 1st but we think that's a bonus. It's giving us a little bit more time. We've already learned a whole bunch by trying to roll this out, by talking to people, by doing user testing, by starting to create block templates and building up the NC State blocks and finding the kinds of problems that people are having is really useful for infirming our decisions about how to proceed and then we have extra time for development. So we think it's a win and I'm not gonna, I cannot possibly speculate on when Gutenberg will drop. I don't happen to think it's gonna be that long. I think they have a lot of accessibility things to work out but I do think there's a lot of pressure on keeping things moving. I don't think it's gonna be four years, but that way. All right, so at some point, we're gonna get away from this conceptual DFVR, whatever thing that Jen put up on the board and actually do the hard work of making sites go from classic WordPress to Guten WordPress. So now the hard work begins. The question everybody has, whether it's on campus or off, is what's gonna happen when we switch to Gutenberg? And that's a hard question to answer because every WordPress website is this happy unique tapestry of themes and plugins and users and content and all the different things that you do. Every site is used in different ways and every site is different. That said, we've identified four typical upgrade scenarios for campus websites and hopefully some of these are relevant to you too. So we've got your vanilla WordPress, not a lot going on besides the core application and maybe a handful of plugins. You've got sites using short kick power short codes or just short codes in general, which our team has done a lot of because I gave a full talk at WordCamp Raleigh and convinced my coworkers that this is the way to go and then Gutenberg happened. We've got sites that use advanced custom fields and especially ACF used really deeply in your theme where you don't even call the content function, instead you're just calling this collection of custom field functions to display different fields, which doesn't necessarily play very well with Gutenberg and then you have sites that use page building plugins like Visual Composer or Divi or Beaver Builder, things like that. When we talk about this on campus, this is the point where we have about 20 slides where we plot out what might happen with each of those upgrade scenarios. We don't really have the time for that right now and the focus of this presentation is on our planning efforts but if you wanna come by the happiness bar, we're very happy to show you what we've found when we've tested different things. That's it, it's all hypothetical at this point. Right, your mileage may vary with your site and also say up front, we have not tested very much with page building plugins. We've mainly looked at short codes in ACF and vanilla WordPress. But if you wanna talk to us more, please do stop by. With all of that informing, all that testing informing our thought process, now we have to start figuring out how this is actually gonna happen, how are we gonna plan this migration from classic to Gutenberg. So we've alluded to the scope of what we're working with. So we have about 50 clients on campus who pay us. The whole economics of paying inside the university is complicated and confusing and I don't understand it, that's Jen's job. But those clients represent more than 125 sites and then on top of that we have these other environments that we manage. The blogs for students, faculty and staff, student organizations, departments and our hosted WordPress environment which is a large multi-site. All of this together consists of upwards of 10,000 sites on campus that are all running WordPress that our group is directly responsible for let alone all of the other sites on campus that are supported by other IT staff. Who would have guessed that 30,000 or 40,000 person campus would generate so many websites. So some of those sites are going to upgrade pretty quickly. A lot of those sites, especially in our blog environment are just plain old vanilla WordPress. Not a lot going on. But a lot of them are going to need to use the classic editor plugin as sort of a fallback after WordPress 5.0 arrives to sort of ease that transition. And if you haven't seen the classic editor plugin before it's basically, so right now you have classic WordPress and you can turn on Gutenberg with the Gutenberg plugin. Once you switch to WordPress 5.0 you'll have Gutenberg and you can turn that off with the classic editor plugin. So in order to make sense of all of this we started evaluating our Guten pane. So some of our new work, our new clients we're going straight into Gutenberg just so that we're thinking about it as we go. But for existing clients some stuff is gonna need a major rewrite. And so we created the Guten decks which is the Gutenberg pane index. You really have to want this one, but I like it. Jen does not. Which is a rubric for deciding how to prioritize and schedule those sites. So the things that we're considering we're thinking about themes whether it's one of our standard supported themes that our office has built. Whether it's something else that was built on campus by other developers or external vendors. And then whether it's something that's bad something that came from who knows where and hasn't been touched in a very long time. There are those things at NC State. We also think about the plugins that are in use whether it's short codes and ACF or whether it's something custom like a page building plugin or something really wild and that you don't see very often. And then we're thinking about our users. Some of them got this. They're gonna pick this up, hit the ground running. Some of them are gonna be a little shaky but a little bit of training and the 20 minutes of trial and error is all they're going to need. And then we have some users on campus who are not going to be okay with this. And so that's a factor we need to take in consideration. So all of that comes together to categorize a site and put it down in our timeline. The categories Jen named are we're cool, we got work and panic mode. I think that's pretty descriptive for how we're feeling about some of these sites. And we have sort of, I guess four different timelines, near term, March to May, which is people who we can transition to Gutenberg even before Gutenberg or even before WordPress 5.0 is properly released using the Gutenberg plugin. Those are mainly people who we have sort of a close relationship with. We know they're going to come to us anytime something weird happens. Then the next wave of people that we're looking at early summer, the wave after that, which is the latter half of the year. And then the people who are going to require a lot of work on our part where we're going to leave them in the classic editor for up to six months or a year, wait until the dust settles and then try to transition them. So this is a screenshot of our master spreadsheet. I don't know how well you can see the colors on the screen, but I'm happy that it's more yellow than red. There's a little bit of green in there too, but not a lot of red. So not a lot of panic mode. So it's all going to be okay. So with all of that in mind, we are optimistically estimating that from the day WordPress 5.0 is released to the day that at least all of our sites are in progress with Gutenberg, even if they're not all the way, would be 12 to 14 months. NC State is a really big organization that we're trying to work with. I think the scale that we're working with is hopefully larger than a lot of people in this room are dealing with, but I think even at the scale that we're dealing with, a year to a year plus is achievable, I hope. So with that in mind, all of the new work we're doing in 2018 is either being Gutenberg from the start or is being built using existing tools, but with Gutenberg in mind. So we're thinking about, maybe we're using a short code here, but how are we going to take the short code and turn it into a Guten block? We've made custom training available to all of the people that we work with, and then once they're trained, they have the option of turning on Gutenberg early for their website to get the hang of it or waiting until it's properly released. And then all of the existing sites that we have, once Word Trust 5.0 drops, will be scheduled and we're going to try to balance the easy sites and the hard sites because otherwise we're going to have a breeze for the first few months and then a really bad August or something like that, and we don't want that to happen. So, oh, I forgot about this. So we're also working on all of our tools. If you attended Miles and Lauren's talk earlier today, you saw the NC State blocks plugin in a little more detail, but just in case you didn't, this is Johannes Wolfenberg, like Johannes Gutenberg, anyway. So Mr. Wolfenberg there is our mascot for our blocks plugin. It's a collaborative cross-campus project. We've engaged with a few of our colleagues and other groups on campus and we're hoping to bring in more people and document what we've done so far to make it easier for them to come in. We're building new Guten blocks that match campus branding and then also building new Guten blocks that interact with other campus APIs and systems so that we have this value add. We're making the switch to Gutenberg, not because we have to, but because we're getting to do this exciting thing because Word Press is giving us all these new tools. I also want to highlight the work of Miles Elliott here in building a block attributes glossary. So if you're building a block template, it is incredibly helpful to know what attributes each block you're working with have available to it. There's not a lot of documentation around this, so Miles built a plugin that will run through all of the blocks in Gutenberg core and also any blocks and plugins that you have installed on a particular website and then spit out a nice attributes glossary so you can see exactly what options you have available both when you're building a block template and when you're building your own unique new Guten blocks to see what's possible, to see what you might model your block after, things like that. It's incredibly useful. Check out this link from the slides when you see the slide link again and go give Miles a hug or something. So yeah, so Jen's gonna talk about why we're actually really happy that this is happening to us. Right, so to be clear, that links to our implementation of that tool which right now has all the default blocks in it so you can already use that to see what already exists, what you can work with for your own block templates or for developing blocks. So yes, sorry to interrupt. Yeah, we are, I'm gonna say it, we're good and excited. It's really worth all this effort. We truly think so. We know it's gonna be a lot of work, but I mean, Matt Maulwijk is not wrong. This is something that's been needed for WordPress and it's probably a little bit overdue and so there's gonna be some painful, some pain felt during this process, but we do think it's a genuinely exciting step for WordPress and it solves a lot of problems. There's a reason why short codes and ACF and custom plugins and page builders have sprouted up all over the place and there's all these different ways to build content. It's because it wasn't, a problem that wasn't being solved by the native tool and Gutenberg is hopefully gonna really do that and so for that reason, those of you who are thinking about bearing your heads in the sand, I hope that at least this presentation has given you a reason to go back and reconsider it. It gives power to the page, to build content natively with Pagebox. Like I said, the thing I'm super excited about and everybody should play with and to quote Miles who put this in his presentation, but I thought it was great. We have this great moment of chaos to take control of our destiny and run with it. Something about rising like a phoenix. Rise, rise, make beautiful things. Yes. And for us, I think this is gonna be successful in part because WordPress's core, the purpose of WordPress has always been its user community and being open source and sharing and I really think that this is a key time to embrace that. Again, it's part of our mission and our priority to share information and be a resource for people, but I think all of WordPress and all the community is gonna embrace that here at some point too and it's really gonna take off. I for one can't wait to see what kind of plugins come out and then what the next steps are. When we have blocks as widgets and all that other crazy stuff, I think it's really gonna be an exciting time for WordPress. So here are some of those resources. The link for the slides is after this, but you can also see our slides from Guten Day, our blog post from the past six months. You can try out Frontenburg to get a sense for blocks for yourself. We are part of the WP Campus Group, which is WordPress for higher education. If you're not already involved with that and you are in higher education, it's a good place to be. Brian does their podcast and he had me on so we could talk about basically what we're talking about here, but if you wanna check that out, it's a good place to be. A little more profanity in that one. Yeah, I did. His last talk was on GDPR, which is also an interesting talk, so. The block attributes glossary here and then also remember that you can tweet us at OIT Design, email us and you can swing by the Happiest Happiness Bar. The Happiest Happiest Bar. Happiest Happiest Bar and we have about 10 minutes. So if folks have questions. Yes. Did you guys actually develop a WP-ready plug-in to check the feed and the plug-ins that are loading as of right now that tell us your GDP debt? So we don't have a plug-in that calculates that. This is all qualitative that we're looking and evaluating ourselves. All right. 50,000 sites? Well, so we're not doing the wall at once. Well, so, you know, the multi-site environment for blocks is the heaviest one. And we have a limited number. We're very restrictive about what plug-ins we put into that environment and really that's one of our vanilla's. So for us, that one's gonna be, ironically, probably one of the easy ones. It might generate a lot of support tickets, but the actual transition should have relatively few conflicts. Yes. What are you hearing about the loose theme that might be introduced? So. Is it gonna take on any more of the attributes that you see in a premium thing that you're so lacking now in the face? Yeah, so I really can't speak to that. I know there's been a little bit of chatter about that, but I don't follow the default theme development very closely. I mean, I think there's an opportunity for the WordPress project to really show off what Gutenberg is capable of with that default theme. So I'm hopeful that it's gonna do a lot of really amazing things. But yeah, I don't think we really know yet. Yeah, I'm excited to see it, but I haven't heard anything. Yes. So are you starting with the classic plug-in on all the sites and then updating them as they go? Or are you just not up? Yeah, so the plan will be to pre-install the classic plug-in update to WordPress 5.0. Maybe not the first day that it's released, but sometime relatively soon. That should go pretty smoothly. And then our user shouldn't notice very much with that. And then selectively turn off the classic editor plug-in as we start doing the transition. Yeah, so I mean, so you can turn on auto updates and it's a WP config option that you can set even major releases to auto update, but unless you've gone in to do that, it should not auto update now. There and then there. Sure, do you have any insights specifically working with advanced custom fields quite locally in our approach? So we have thoughts and we have a sort of a work in progress script for converting ACF content into blocks. You need to have a good mapping in place already of like here are your ACF fields and here are the fields that it's going to map into in the block. So you might need to create the custom blocks first and then run that sort of a script. Do you want to step by the happiness bar? We can show you a little bit about that. In terms of like just a flip the switch and everything magically happens, I don't think it's going to be that easy. Yeah. So we don't have a clear plan to deal with that. So I know what you're talking about. So there's going to be like a banner or something like that that's going to, in one of these upcoming releases, it's going to appear for people in the WordPress dashboard that says, have you heard about Gutenberg? Try out Gutenberg. And if you're a site administrator with the ability to install a plugin, it's going to take you like one or two clicks to install a Gutenberg plugin and turn it on. I think there are, I think a lot of, so any environment like a multi-site where we don't allow, we don't allow all of our users to install plugins on their own. I don't think, I think what that will generate are support questions like, tell me about the Gutenberg thing. I want to try it out. And then we can decide whether or not to install and activate that plugin on a case-by-case basis. For the people on campus who do have administrative rights and can turn it on, I think most of the people that we work with have been trained pretty well to not just turn things on without talking to us first. Well, I will say that we didn't talk about this here, but we've done a lot of communication with campus. There's a campus communicators channel and both us and then central communications that also has a lot of clients on campus have reached out to campus generally and then their clients specifically to give them a heads up on this. So if they've been paying any amount of attention and that's not any guarantee that they have, but they've probably heard Gutenberg. So I don't think it's gonna be, there shouldn't be that many people who like lock in one day and say, hey, Gutenberg, that sounds fun. I've never heard of that. Let's do this. Most of them should have heard about it and know that we have a plan and that it's, they shouldn't do this. That being said, that's definitely something that's on our radar, like when that happens, when that banner is available. Clear the day. Yeah, we know that there's going to be people who turn it on and we just have to be prepared to have that conversation. Yeah, we know. For now, we're really trying to be. Good and positive. Yeah, we're doing good and positive. We're letting people do their worst and trying to learn from it. And then, you know, like check back later and we'll tell you how that went. Yeah, great. So we have a sandbox environment that anybody can go and create a new site and test out Gutenberg. We don't have like a mirror of other campus sites. We arguably don't have the most sophisticated development processes in the world or staging processes because it's a big campus and it's a lot to handle. But there will definitely be some sites that we want to clone into a press environment while we work on those panic mode sites. Yeah, yeah. Yep. Well, we're trying to spread that out. So there are some that will probably start so a little campus background. Our fiscal year and our billing cycle doesn't start until July. So there's probably won't start on any craziness until then just to sort of get a handle on the easy stuff and hopefully Gutenberg will be out by then. And then the plan will be to spread them out a little bit, share the misery, so to speak, and start with some of the bad ones. There's probably, I would say, there's like maybe three or four clients representing probably six or seven sites for us that are really bad, that we're really worried about. And so we'll try to front load some of those earlier on and then learn from those, maybe even start with some of the harder ones and then put the rest out over the next couple of months. Everybody feeling excited? Yes, that's a good question. They do have the HTML, in case you're not aware, there is a block for the HTML or a classic editor block which does have everything in the kitchen sink in it. So, yes, it's still there. It would not be too hard to create a kitchen sink block Oh stop! No, you can't. All right, so yeah, we'll be at the happiness bar. Thanks everybody for coming and happy Gutenberg.