 Okay. We are recording. Welcome everybody as you are joining. Today is going to be a little bit different from usual. We're not gonna be doing any coding today. I'm just going to be talking. I don't know why my camera has this blur effect. I'm going to switch that off. There we go. That's better. What happened? So as you're joining, nothing to set up, nothing to configure. We're just gonna have a chat today. So let us know what you're joining from in the chat. I am going to take a chance today and I'm going to disable focus mode just because today is a bit more of a relaxed day. So hopefully nobody shares anything that they shouldn't. If they do, we will pause and either mute them or kick them or whatever we need to do. But I would like things to be a little bit more relaxed today, a little bit less. What's the word? Developery. This is just a nice chat. So if you want to start enabling your cameras and your mics, if you would like to, maybe leave it muted until you want to talk. Maybe that's easier. But feel free to chat today. Feel free to say hi. Feel free to chat with me while we're talking today. Ask questions as we go. I'll go through the usual announcements in a bit. But yeah, just a bit more of a relaxed chat today. I like to do these sort of more relaxed sessions every few weeks, less worrying about getting on with code and building things, all of that. So if you'd like to enable your camera so I can see that'll be great. You should be able to see each other. And then if anything goes wrong, if anybody zoom bombs us, we'll just deal with it. OK, so let's see. We've got Ryan Antrack, 702. Kurt from Atlanta, Georgia. Clint from San Antonio, Texas. Mary Beth from Manhattan, New York. Ivan from Seattle, Washington. Dan from Washington State. Artists from Germany. Adrian from Anaheim, California. Mark Andrews in Baja, Mexico at the moment. Gladys is from Santa Monica. But in Park City, Utah now for the winter. OK, so we've got folks from all over, mostly in the States by the looks of it. Adrian says, no camera. It's early and I've just rolled out a bit. Fair enough. That's totally fair. MLWP is from Snohomish. I hope I've pronounced that correctly. OK, let me do the introductions quickly. So you've all introduced yourselves. Welcome. My name is Jonathan. I'm from Cape Town in South Africa. I'm a developer educated, automatic, and I'm sponsored to work with the training team, the WordPress training team full time. And you can find me online at JonathanBossinger.com if you ever need to see what I'm up to. Let's get the announcements out of the way. I don't have a co-host today because, as I said, this is a very relaxed chat, very chilled. I have switched off focus mode. So I don't know why I left that one there. But as I said, you are welcome to ask questions. You're welcome to ask questions as we go. You're welcome to leave them in the chat. You're welcome to tell me to slow down if that's needed. You shouldn't need to tell me to slow down today because things should be a little bit more relaxed and a little bit less hurried. But do let me know if you have any questions about what we're going to discuss today. I had this conversation with somebody recently. I know of myself that I say um a lot. And apparently there's training that you can go on that trains you to not say um when you speak. But apparently it turns out that humans actually appreciate speaking to another human that is fallible and says um. So if you ever hear me stop saying um, then you know I've been taken over by an AI bot. And that's your cue to look out for those. Okay, today's um discussion is where do you go to learn WordPress? And if you would like to, and I would like to encourage you to do so, if you go to slido.com or slidu.com, I don't know you pronounce that. And right at the top of the window, I'm going to pop that open now so you can see what that looks like. Slido.com, slidio, no, slido.com. Right at the top of that screen is a little area where you can enter your code. This join is a participant screen. Enter your code there. That will take you into this code. Should I say three nine, right? Let's go back to set three nine, two, five, two, four, one. I'm going to pop it in the chat. Three nine, two, five, two, four, one. And if you enter that code, it's going to take you to a little interactive poll that I've set up for this. It's just a little word cloud. And I would like you to enter any of the places that you go to to learn WordPress. So when you are wanting to learn about how to do something with WordPress, what are the sites or documentation or anywhere that you think of that you go to? I'd like you to give you the opportunity to type those in now. I'll give it a few minutes while folks are doing that. And then we'll have a look and we'll see where everybody goes and where they learn from. I'm expecting some answers today to lean maybe towards what I'm discussing, which is fine. While you're entering your answers, I'm presenting this same talk in about two hours at a local meetup. So it's going to be interesting to see what I'm going to do is I'm going to take a screenshot of the word cloud after the session and then clear it and then take another one at the meetup. And it'll be interesting to compare the two and see what kind of results I get. So please feel free to enter as many as you can think of, as many as you would like to. And I just want to get an idea of where folks go when they need to learn about WordPress. While we're doing that, I should be able to open up this event with this URL that I'm going to grab here. And I should start seeing answers coming through. So I'm going to pop that in there. Let's see what I get. Yes, here we go. Okay, so now I'm getting some solutions. I've got YouTube is the big one. Yes, YouTube is a great resource for learning things, anything really. I have learned how to fix things on my car. Thanks to YouTube. I have learned how to program sprinkler irrigation units. Thanks to YouTube. We've got Google. Yes, Google search, I'm sure. We've got live streams, podcasts, Udemy, WordPress support, meetups. We've got Jonathan's Learn WP. Thank you for ever put that down. I appreciate that. It looks like some of these might be breaking up somehow. We've got theme developers YouTube videos. That's a good place. We've got LinkedIn Learning. That's another good place. WordPress. Oh, it's another good place. Cool. So it looks like you've all got some great places where you go to learn about WordPress and that. And that's great. And I was expecting YouTube to be one of the big ones. So yeah, that's super interesting. Thank you for entering those answers. So today, I want to talk specifically about Learn WordPress. Now, usually when I do these let's code sessions, I mentioned that there is this website called learn.wordpress.org, otherwise known as Learn WordPress. And it is a platform, Kurt says, I'm so new to it, I haven't gone anywhere. Okay, perfect. Well, then today is for you, Kurt. So Learn WordPress is a site that was set up. I actually was doing some research on this this morning. It was originally set up in 2010. And the idea was that it was just going to be a blog about things where you could go to find learning materials. And that was at about the same time that the training team in the WordPress community was started and founded. And the idea behind the training team was to sort of gather useful learning materials and put them together in one place. The site kind of languished in sort of a, what you could say, limbo status for a number of years. And then in 2020, when everything went a bit crazy, as we all know, folks weren't able to go to word camps. They weren't able to go to meetups. And so the community started saying, well, we'll sort of thinking about, well, how can we take what we had for meetups and word camps and how can we create online spaces where the community can gather, where the community can learn from each other? Because word camps and meetups used to be the place where people went to learn. They used to go to workshops and go to talks and connect with the community. And so the first iteration of Learn WordPress was sort of launched in about August of 2020. And there are a few types of content that you can learn from when it comes to Learn WordPress. There are courses, there are tutorials, there are lesson plans and there are online workshops. I'm going to walk through all of these today with you and discuss what they are, how they work, what you need to access them and my recommendations of how to use them. So I'm going to start, not in the order that I've put it down here, I'm going to start with lesson plans. And if you go to learn.wordpress.org, you will see right at the top, just underneath the introduction and the search for a learning resource bar, there are these two big blocks. The one is tutorials and the other one is lesson plans. Lesson plans are specifically designed for folks like myself, folks who want to teach or share WordPress with others at meetups or at word camps. And so a lesson plan is exactly what the word says. It's a plan for a lesson of content that you want to create. Now, you'll notice that as I'm scrolling down here, the first couple are in different languages because we've got quite a big drive within the training team right now to get most of our lesson plans translated. But if I scroll down to the bottom and pop over to page two or page three, I should find an English one that we can have a look at and we'll run through what a lesson plan is, how it works and how you can use it. So let me just find one here quickly. Here we go. Let's say locking blocks in the full site editor, there's a good example of a lesson plan. So a lesson plan has a few specific parts. It starts with the description, which describes what the lesson plan is about and what the lesson is about. It has some objectives. So the idea is that when you have shared this lesson or taught this lesson, these are the things that the participants should be able to do. So as an example today, one of my objectives is that after this lesson, folks should know how to find lesson plans on Learn WordPress. That could be an objective. Then there are prerequisite skills. So you might want to have to check whether the folks that are coming to your talk have certain skills, certain knowledge. For example, when I present let's code sessions, I always say in the Meetup event, you need to have a local WordPress environment. You need to have an IDE or a code editor or whatever. Those are prerequisites to be able to join the session. Then there are some readiness questions. And these are good to do at the beginning of your presentation, on the beginning of your lesson or your talk to check that the folks in that group can do the things that you want them to be able to do. So this one is talking about locking blocks in the site editor. So one of the question is, do you want to make changes to your theme? And if the answer is yes, then that audience is good for your lesson. The next one is slides. We try and put together an example set of a slide deck for each lesson plan, but sometimes that's not possible. Then below that is materials needed. So what are the physical things that an audience member would need to be able to take part in this lesson? And generally it's a local WordPress install and a theme installed. Sometimes it might be another plugin that they need or a piece of code or whatever the case may be. Then there are some notes of the presenter. So this is more just kind of explaining what we're doing. Talking about, for example, this feature is only available in WordPress 6.0. So don't use an older version of WordPress, just kind of preparing the presenter to make sure they do the homework and get ready to do their talk. Then there is a lesson outline and that kind of is just an overview of the different steps that you walk through and how you would set up a lesson. And then there are some exercises. So there are some things that you could get your audience to do if you're presenting this lesson, you can get them to work with different things. Then below that, there is some assessment questions. So you could ask these questions after your lesson, who can lock blocks and those kind of questions. So these are things that you can use if you're presenting this topic. There are some additional resources and then right at the bottom there's an actual example lesson. So if you're presenting this topic, you could actually take this example lesson and use it as a script and sort of speak the words as it is, maybe refine it for yourself a little bit. And then there's some screenshots that you can refer to. So you could use this whole lesson plan and actually present a workshop or a talker or whatever on this content. So as you can see by all this information, lesson plans are specifically designed for folks who want to teach WordPress. Hopefully, if I am successful today, some of you might end the session going, yes, I would like to teach WordPress one day and then lesson plans will be perfect for you and you can use them to go and present talks. So it's not specifically to learning WordPress, but I always believe that the best way to learn something is to teach it, to prepare to teach it. So if you've got topics that you have some knowledge of and you wanna present them at your local meetups or your local WordPress camps, and you don't quite know everything that you might need, a lesson plan is a great way to start. So those are lesson plans specifically designed for folks who want to teach WordPress. Any questions on lesson plans or the lesson plan that we looked at or anything else that anybody wants to say around lesson plans before we move on to tutorials? I find my water and have a quick sip. Okay, don't seem to have somebody says the bit that I've taught I would agree, teaching is a great way to learn. There's a little bit of a joke that we have in the training team and that is to create educational content for learn WordPress, you have to learn WordPress. And it's just a little joke that we have because oftentimes I find that when I am preparing content or learn WordPress or for a talk or for an event, I have a good idea of how this thing works, but then I realized to be able to teach it, there are certain fundamental foundational aspects that I have in my head, but the learner might not and they might need to put those pieces in and it often sends me down a path of learning something more. So I've always thought the best way to learn something is to prepare to teach it. Okay, then the next type of content we have on learn WordPress are tutorials. These are very specifically aimed at folks who want to learn. So if you're here today, like Kurt who mentioned earlier, you're brand new to WordPress. You want to learn about WordPress. Tutorials are a great place to start. The tutorials that we have on learn WordPress are typically in the region of around 10 to 15 minutes long. So there are nice short, wide sized things that you can watch on a specific piece of content. There are tutorials designed for sort of users. There are tutorials designed for builders. There are tutorials designed for what I call extenders. So folks that are writing code or developers, you can call them. And there's tutorials about all different types of topics. If you go back and you look at the tutorials page, if you go from the learn WordPress homepage and you just click on the browse tutorials button, you will see that there are also some filters that you can filter on. So you can filter by a specific series. You can filter by a specific topic. So if you're looking for block development tutorials, if you're looking for e-commerce tutorials, if you're looking for specifically core tutorials, there are also tutorials around contributing to WordPress, around certain teams within WordPress. There are tutorials about hosting. There's a whole range of different options. There aren't lots of tutorials on some of these topics, but there are some, I think there's at least one per topic hopefully. Then we've also got a language dropdown. So all of the languages that we do have content for is listed in that dropdown. So if you're looking for German content, if you're looking for Portuguese content, if you're looking for Spanish content, there are those options available. We also do try and subtitle all of our tutorial videos. And if you're looking for content with different subtitles, you can look for those as well, or you can filter by WordPress version. You can also search tutorials. So if I was wanting to learn about how the site editor works, I can type in site editor and hit search, and then it'll give me all the tutorials that relate to the site editor and I can go through and I can see how they work. The tutorials themselves are a video. And as I said, they're usually between, usually between 10, around 10 to 15 minutes long. We try not to keep them too long. The developer focused more sort of in-depth technical tutorials that I tend to work on sometimes go over the 15 minute mark just because I need to dive into this topic quite deeply sometimes to explain it. We also include in the tutorials right at the top, we include a short introduction, some learning outcomes to give you an idea of what you should be able to do when you finish this tutorial, some comprehension questions that you can ask yourself before you take the tutorial or afterwards to make sure you understand it. Additional links as well, so you can do further reading and then a transcript of the tutorial. So if you want to just read through instead of watching the video, you can do that as well. One of the things that we've also started doing with tutorials, and this is specifically with the ones that are to do with, I'm gonna go back one page and get one of my most recent ones. Specifically the sort of developer focused ones, the coding ones, you're learning to code things is we've included what we call the video transcript in a dropdown little area which is just the transcribed version of the person talking. But then below that a more formal almost lesson plan style version of the tutorial. So if you're somebody who I firmly believe that there are two types of people, well, there's people that learn a few ways. Some folks learn by watching a video, some folks learn by reading, some folks prefer to have both, some folks prefer to listen only. I'm one of those people who I like to watch the video but I like to have the code snippets handy somewhere. So in the tutorials that have code snippets, we've included those in the tutorial content. So for example, this one about the REST API that I created, there is some example code that you could use and you could put into your plugins or your themes and you could learn how these things work while you're watching the video. Okay, so those are specifically content for learners tutorials and I would highly recommend if you're wanting to learn WordPress to start digging into those. Okay, any questions on tutorials or how they work or anything around them before we move on? All right, we don't seem to have questions so we can move on to the next piece of content. The next piece of content we have are courses. So courses are sort of a combination of text and video content. Sometimes they're just text, sometimes they're not just video but majority video, sometimes they're a combination of both but a course is more of a focused learning, let's say pathway. So for example, the most recent course that we published was the converting a short code to a block course. So this is very specifically, you're somebody who is a short code developer, you've developed short codes before, you now want to learn to turn those short codes into blocks. It takes a very simple example, it steps you through from step one to step two to step three to step four to step five and in a course there are also quizzes often that you can take to make sure that your knowledge, that you're learning the information there, sort of self-test process and then at the end of a course, there are usually some further reading materials that you can follow up on. Often you will find that the courses will take and use some of the existing tutorials and some of the existing lesson plans and incorporate them into courses because it makes sense to reuse some content that's already out there. The courses that myself and my colleagues are working on are very much like that. So this short code to block course is five, one, two, three, four tutorials that I'd recorded previously and just kind of brought them together as a standalone course. The one difference between, and I want to just show you, I'm going to log out of my WordPress.org profile quickly so you can see this as a new user to the Learn WordPress website. Let me go back to Learn WordPress here so I'm not currently logged in at the moment. You will see that tutorials you can watch without needing to be logged in. You can click on any tutorial, you can click on the play button, you can read the content, you don't need to be logged in. Lesson plans is the same, you can click on your lesson plan. I'm just going to go browse all lesson plans. I'm going to just grab the first one. You can click on it, you can view it, you can read the content, no problem. Courses require you to have a logged in account on WordPress.org. So if I go to the introduction to block development, build your first custom block course, for example, I can read all about it and see how it works and what it's about. But then when I click on the take the course button, it's going to ask me to log in. And I will, I'm just sorry, I'm just moving something over to the side here. So if I click on take this course, it's going to ask me to log into my WordPress.org account. So if you don't have a WordPress.org account, this is a great time to create it. The reason, so to explain why we require the login is we like to, we like to not track, but we like to get an idea of how many people are taking the courses and how many people are completing the courses. This just allows us to see whether the courses are beneficial, whether folks are finishing it. If they're not finishing it, maybe we need to look at the content, maybe some of the quizzes are the problem. The software, the Sensei LMS system that we use also requires a logged in user. So that's why it requires you to create a WordPress.org account. I would mention that by creating a WordPress.org account, you're not giving away any information to anybody that is used in any of the various purposes, but it does become useful later on when I talk about something else which I'm going to get to. So don't feel like you should prevent yourself from doing courses because of this requirement to log in. There was a question in the chat. I'm just going to pause quickly to see about that. Do you typically need a website or hosting to do tutorials locally? That's a great question. I see that Adrian's already given one answer and thank you very much for that. But I also want to mention that there are alternative options. So if you have a look here on this course, there's a practice on a private demo site button and this is something called WP Playground. So WP Playground, excuse me, I struggle with P's and L's. WP Playground is a instance of WordPress that exists in the browser. A very clever contributor has developed this. It runs in JavaScript, but it uses something called a WASM, something thing in the background. And you're able to fire up this instance, go in and use it like you would a WordPress install and play around. You'll see that at the top here, it's installing the 2023 theme for me while this is going on. And you can then use it like a live WordPress installation. I would mention and I will just say this, that it is still currently under active development. So there may be bugs here and there, but we're hoping that as they iron out these bugs, this will become something that we can recommend to our folks who are learning WordPress as a way of having a WordPress install that they can push, pull, break while they're going through the tutorial, write some code, see what it does in a very safe enclosed space. So there's also, I'm going to mention this now, there's also for those of you who use visual code studio, there is a WordPress playground extension being worked on. So you'll be able to fire up a version of this in your VS code. So there's all kinds of fun things going on in that space. So keep an eye out for that. Mark Andrew also recommended another option which I was going to get to. So thank you Mark for that one. It's called InstaWP and it allows you to spin up a WordPress site in literally less than a second with a sort of randomized URL on the InstaWP network. And you can do the same thing. You can log into it, you can push, pull, break it and then you can destroy it afterwards after you finish your tutorial or your course. So these are some great resources for to use while you're learning WordPress so you don't have to set up a local environment. And then the other one that Adria did mention and I'm going to link on that is local WP. I don't like to recommend, let's call it freemium products in these sessions because you might feel then, you might think that my recommendation means you should go and support their paid services. So InstaWP is a service that has a free option and then an upgrade to include some functionality. It's perfect for learning. You can use the free version for learning no problem. Local WP is the same thing. It's a local environment. It's 100% free. I think the paid version has moved away but it's owned by WP Engine and they sort of upsell the use in their hosting. If you use local WP, you can quickly push to their hosting. So that's sort of their upsell. I'm not here to knock either of these companies. I think it's great that these things exist. The reason I recommend local is because it is one of the easiest local development environments to use. If you want a local WordPress install, it works across all operating systems. I've tested this myself on both Windows, Mac OS and my Ubuntu boots and it just installs with no problem and it just works. And I like things that just work. So that's why that's also one of my recommendations for installing a local WordPress environment. Okay. Thank you to Mark and Adrian for sharing those resources. As you can see, this demo playground is still loading so it's not quite there yet. But hopefully we'll get there soon. Okay. So thank you to who is that? Thank you to Ivan for that question. Okay. So we've covered courses, we've covered tutorials, we've covered lesson plans. The last one is online workshops. Online workshops are effectively these sessions that we're having today. We used to call them social learning spaces. The idea was that there are spaces where we learn together. There is a facilitator who prepares for the workshop or prepares for the social learning space. And ideally either has answers or confined answers if there are any questions. But the idea is that we learn together, we do things together, we figure things out together. We renamed them to online workshops purely because there was a confusion in the translation team within WordPress. They were translating these events around the different multilingual WordPress sites. And the term social in social learning has different connotation in Europe. It has the more sort of social welfare connotation in Europe. So there was a concern that it came across as something for folks who were living on bread and water as opposed to learning from each other. So that's why it changed online workshops. It's still not the right name. It still doesn't bring across the perfect idea of learning together. But that was the reason for the change. Those are all listed. Let me go back to the Learn WordPress site. And unfortunately, as is the nature of the web and the concept of below the fold. If you go to learnwordpress.org, your tutorials and your lesson plans and your search are above the fold. I can see them on my screen. But I have to scroll a little bit to find my courses. And then you have to scroll a little bit more to find more tutorials. And then a little bit more down below that then you find all the online workshops. And so you can view the most recent online workshops that are coming up. You'll see the very next one is this update to a video tutorial for Learn WordPress which is happening at 9 p.m. my time, probably later in the day for the folks in the U.S. You can join this workshop from here. You can view all online workshops from here. All of these online workshops are linked through to the Meetup event page. So if you've never seen this calendar before, not a problem. If you've only discovered these online workshops through Meetup.com, that's great. But this is the calendar that you can actually subscribe to. And you can actually have these in your calendar event. Here we go, subscribing to Google Calendar and those things to remind you of when these workshops are coming. And you'll see at the bottom, it says RSVP and communications are handled through Meetup.com. Okay. And as I said, the workshops are more sort of informal, longer form, about an hour long, and they're usually around similar kinds of topics. The workshops are also a great place to bring your questions around that topic. You don't have that option with tutorials and lesson plans. The workshops is where it's a good idea. If you see a workshop coming up about it, it's a topic that you're interested in and you have questions, that's a great way to bring them along, see if the workshop covers those questions. If it doesn't, then you can ask them. I see that Don said there's also Dev Kinster. Yes, that's another option. Dev Kinster is very similar to... I'm gonna open that up quickly so we can see it. Dev Kinster is very similar to local WP. It's a free local option, usable across platform. But like local WP, if you want to gain the massive benefit of it, you have Kinster hosting and you push from local WP to Kinster. It's just as good as local WP. I actually, I don't mind sharing this. I wrote when I was still working at Delicious Brains. I wrote a review of Dev Kinster. I'm gonna see if I can find it quickly and I'll share it with you all if you would like to read that. I actually did a review of this Dev Kinster and something else. And I can't remember what the other thing was. Let me see. Here we go. I reviewed the Kraft Nitro. There we go. Kraft Nitro and Dev Kinster. So take a read at that and you can see my thoughts around those options. So if you're a local Dev environment nerd like me, I love digging into local Dev environments and seeing what they can do and what they can't do. I recommend going and reading that. Okay. So those are the four. I see we've got some other options that have come up. Let's have a look at those. We've got Discord with Matt, with Ryan Welcher. That's a great one. Discord with other groups. Theme developers, YouTube videos. What else? We've got FSE website. Yes, that's another good one. Awesome stuff here. I'm gonna make sure to screenshot this at the end of the session and we can compare it. And I'll share the screenshots with you in the meetup comments and we can compare the two and see what folks thought. Okay. So those are the four learned WordPress types of content that you can learn from. Then I just wanna mention WordPress.tv and meetup.com. Now, many of you should already know about meetup.com. You probably RSVP to this event there. You got the Zoom link from meetup.com. So I just wanna mention that if you don't know about it, but basically that's the place where we post and manage all these events. You will usually see that the facilitators will interact with the folks in the community. They might share things afterwards. Generally, I'm gonna find a past event of mine just so that we can... Just wanna find one of my past events to kind of show you the interaction. Developer hours, no. Let me just give me one second here. Probably should have bookmarked this before I read my slides. But here's the last online workshop that I did. And I usually try and include a link to the slides before the event so that folks can get hold of the slides, get any requirements that they might need for the event, get prepared, get set up. And then I also post the link to WordPress TV afterwards. So now's a good time to talk about WordPress TV. WordPress TV is like WordPress's version of YouTube. I'm just gonna call it that. So all video content that exists in the WordPress space is uploaded to WordPress TV. Anybody who uses... Anybody who goes to a meetup and records the meetup talk, anybody who hosts a WordCamp and records those WordCamp talks, any tutorials that are recorded, any workshops that are recorded are uploaded to WordPress TV. And we use WordPress TV because it supports the subtitles for us. It supports sharing it all over the place. So if you have a look at a tutorial on WordPress, it's actually in an embedded WordPress TV URL. The one thing that I like about sharing the WordPress TV URL is that there is a comment section on the videos. So if you have questions about the tutorial, let me go back one step. Let me find... Let me go to Learn WordPress. And I'm going to close down the events. And I'm going to open up one of my recent tutorials, which I think I published here we go, is the Modifying WordPress Rest API Modifying Responses Tutorial. And then I'm going to go to WordPress TV and I'm going to search in WordPress TV that same title. That should bring up the video, there it is. And you'll see that if you were to watch these two videos, they're exactly the same because this one from WordPress TV is embedded into the tutorial page. But the nice thing is, is if you have questions around the content in this tutorial, you can post these questions here on the WordPress TV page. And I get notification because I uploaded that video. So I'll get a notification of that question. So if you're ever working through a tutorial and you have questions around how it works and what it does, go and find the tutorial on WordPress TV and then you can post those questions directly to me there. It's a great way to get hold of me and any of the other tutorial creators, video creators. One of our requirements for publishing tutorials to learn WordPress is that they are loaded on WordPress TV. One of our requirements for creating online workshops is that they get uploaded to WordPress TV. As Kurt said, adding comments to meetup can be difficult sometimes. We don't control meetup.com. It's a third-party service that the WordPress Foundation pays for. So my recommendation to interact with us is to do it on WordPress TV rather than doing it on meetup.com. I'm just gonna scroll back on the chat and just see Don says, other meetups I had 10 recommended to care that was about local environments. Adrian says, I've used the WordPress TV links afterwards several times. Yes, I've definitely seen Adrian's quite great. She'll pop into the meetup chat and say, I can't make it because I'm at Axcon or something important. And then she'll go and watch the video afterwards and catch up. So it's a great way to do that. And as mentioned, Kurt said the comments in meetup sometimes tricky. There are two specific URLs that I wanna share with you. The first one is the Learn WordPress category. So this is every single video that is uploaded to Learn WordPress will exist under this category on WordPress TV. So effectively what you're getting here is a massive overview, all tutorials, all workshops, any Learn WordPress content is on this page. And it's a great way to look for the things you want to look for and find them. The other one is specifically there's another category called Learn WordPress online workshops. So if you just want to find the workshops, you can focus on those and you can look through them there. Okay. Mary Beth says, if you want to learn development is there a suggested sequence to the courses? That's a great question, Mary Beth. I am actually going to share a post with you quickly. This is actually something that I'm busy working on at the moment. I'm working on an introduction to WordPress development syllabus. So the idea is that if you want to learn WordPress development all of this content will exist as a series of courses with a prescribed learning path. Prescribed mean I recommend it but you don't have to follow it. And you will then, I'm going to share this post in the chat so that everybody can get hold of it. And you will then be able to follow the prescribed learning path and either take the courses in order or go, oh wait, hang on, this course I don't need. So I'll move on to the next one. So that's the good news. The bad news is, or the sad news or the however you want to frame it, the cloud to my silver lining is that if you look through this list you will see that all the ones that are linked in blue are the ones where the tutorial content exists. And all the ones that aren't linked in blue are the areas where the tutorial content does not exist. I'm busy working on it. My plan, my personal goal as a contributor to the training team is to spend at least the rest of this year. Hopefully it doesn't take me that long. We are in March now. So hopefully nine months ended March. So hopefully nine months is enough but to make sure that all this content is created and then start putting it into courses. I am hoping to convince other contributors to join me in this effort. Other folks who understand these concepts and could create these tutorials with me so that we can speed up the process. So I'm probably gonna be starting top down and working my way through and then hopefully folks can work through those tutorials as we go. But eventually that will be a good way to get started. Right now, there isn't a specifically prescribed way to do it. So my recommendation would be to go and have a look at the courses and see which ones stand out to your specific need in terms of knowledge and start working through some of them. Okay. Great. That's that. I just wanna go back to here. Okay, so I've covered all of that. So I think we can close that and we can close that and we can close that and we can close that and we can close that. All right. Now comes the sales pitch. Now comes the part where I asked you to help me to do all of this. Okay. I am a firm believer in the fact that if I want something to thrive I need to give some of myself to that something. I am a father of two children if I want them to thrive I have to give of myself to be their dad and be a good example and those kinds of things. I can't just sit around and take all the benefit of being a parent I've gotta give something back. If I'm part of a community if I'm part of a job or whatever I need to give something of myself. And the great thing about the WordPress space the WordPress open source project is there are many ways to get involved and give back. And learn WordPress is in my opinion one of the easiest to get involved in and one of the most fulfilling because you are interacting directly with people every week. You are giving people knowledge that they need. I am a firm believer that knowledge is power. And the learn WordPress team the training team that manages learn WordPress almost operates like a little independent open source team with inside the larger WordPress open source team. So I have as a member of the training team I have, and some of you might remember these I have during an online workshop on testing the beta version of WordPress discovered a bug, logged that bug that bug was fixed and I was included in the credits for WordPress 6.2 because I was doing a workshop on that topic I had not planned to do this it was not my goal but it happened. So there are lots of ancillary I think ancillary is the right word or complimentary should I say things that can happen to you if you're involved in learn WordPress. They say that you should always share your story make it personal so that people kind of buy into the sales pitch. So I would like to share my story. So in June of 2020, a friend of mine named Hugh Lashbrook who worked for automatic he's since left but he and I knew each other from Cape Town he reached out to me and he said to me, hey, by the way we are relaunching learn WordPress as I mentioned to you earlier to kind of get the community learning online get the community together. We're looking for developer focus content I know you to be somebody who is a developer who likes speaking would you mind putting something together? And so on the 11th of August, 2020 you can see that my original tutorial that I ever built for learn WordPress is still there is an introduction to Gutenberg block development because we were still calling it Gutenberg and not the block editor back then and you'll see as well that it's 47 minutes long so I don't recommend going to watch it because it's a large chunk of your time and it's also almost three years old now so the information is a bit out of date. Side note, the short code to block course that I mentioned earlier is the updated version of this tutorial. So go and do that one, not this one but it was a fun experience I got to get an idea creating content for learn WordPress and then I largely forgot about it fast forward to the 3rd of February, 2022 I was working for Delicious Brains the company that I mentioned earlier I had joined as a developer educator but my role had changed from developer educated to technical writer because I was doing more technical writing than developer education and I started that year saying to myself that the work that I enjoy the most is creating the educational content and I'd spoken to my boss about it and he said to me, well, find if you can suggest educational content around our products and what we do then we can do that stuff. So on the 3rd of February, 2022 I posted and I don't mind sharing this this is the public training team channel in Slack you'll see the message at the top here hopefully you can see the message at the top here at 9.46 a.m. my time I said, hey folks I'm looking to get back into creating some learn courses in 2022 I actually meant content just anything, tutorials, courses, whatever this is my goal I wanna join the sort of kickstart myself into the training team you'll see I joined the training team channel at 8.51 and the goal was this is what I wanna start doing I wanna take my contribution time that I have and create content for Learn WordPress because of that first experience being so fun. The very next day I don't think I've ever shared this publicly outside of work literally the very next day on the 4th of February my friend Hugh Lashbrook who was at that stage the team lead of the team that I'm now part of it at Automatic tweeted to say I'm looking for a developer educator to join my community education team at Automatic we're working on a really exciting educational platform for WordPress users and developers that could use some technical expertise and I went and the great thing about Hugh what I love about Hugh is he didn't send me this message he tweeted it so it wasn't like he gave me special preference he tweeted it out and then he sent me the tweet and I went well thank you I actually saw it online and I'm contemplating applying a few weeks before this happened I was having a conversation with another WordPress contributor his name is I'm not do I have that no I don't I don't have that link now I'm a bit annoyed I thought I had copy pasted it but I had not so please give me a second while I find it his name is Jeff Paul here it is if you don't know Jeff Paul he is the I can't remember his title but he works with the open source team at an agency called Tenna and he's very involved in the core development process he's a project manager so he usually helps manage project managed core releases well-known guy and I had been speaking to him I don't mind sharing this information but I had been speaking to him from the beginning of that year about not being sure about where I am and what I'm doing and whether what I'm doing is what I want to be doing and on February the 4th at 2.37 a.m. my time he also shared this tweet with me and it was almost like one of those moments where the universe was saying to me look two people you respect have now sent you this job you should apply and you'll see that I said in the in the thing there's definitely more in line with what I want to be doing contributing to open source full time helping other developers be successful with the tools available working with a team of folks I know and admire at delicious brains I had the second to but I wasn't contributing full time I really wanted to contribute full time and that delicious brains a company that is focused on their products that just wasn't a possibility and that's and that's fine so there the job came along and then you will see on April the 16th there I mentioned to Jeff but I'll go back to my slides on April the 20th I shared a blog post on my blog to say that I had applied and I was successful and I was joining automatic that May so I just wanted to share that from the point of view of I didn't plan this I was thinking about it I was thinking about how I was going to get involved I was getting involved because I wanted to get involved my getting involved led to me finding the job that I'm doing today so manifestation yes my wife my wife tells talks to me about manifestation I just want to go back to the to the chat quickly and just check that I didn't miss any any questions there was a question about the URL for the recommended block it's a presentation I think that was the I'm not sure which one that was MLWP Shnamesh is that the the course or I don't remember which one that was now think about it was the course OK, yes so that was the course that I built based on this one so let me go back to learn WordPress and find that course for you it's a course that is that is sort of a starter to taking shortcuts to a block there it is let me share that with you there in the chat OK great I'm glad some folks enjoyed that story I think this is the first time I've told it outside of work so I'm happy to share it with you OK, so let's talk about how you can contribute these are just some screenshots in case my wife I went down of the different things so the WordPress training team is one of the many training teams that exist in the learn word in the WordPress space I just want to go back to the make sorry, I'm going to go back to the community page so if you go to make.wordpress.org you will see all of the teams listed there the first one is obviously the core team they deal with the WordPress core software and then we have design we have mobile accessibility and then we have training over here I don't want you to join the training team I would like you to join the team that makes the most sense to you I would like to suggest joining the training team because it makes the most sense to me maybe you're not somebody who wants to be part of training and that's OK but have a look through see if you can find a team that you want to contribute to if you already contribute to one of those teams I applaud you and I thank you for your contribution I think it's amazing if you aren't I highly recommend giving it a shot one of the first teams I contributed to was the documentation team and I literally just help them copy documentation from one side to another those are my first contributions so there are no small contributions all contributions are equal everybody gets a medal OK but specifically the WordPress training team there is a a contribute page on learn.wordpress.org that talks about how you can contribute where you can get in touch it talks about the training channel in Slack it talks about the training team site how to get involved it talks about how you can facilitate online workshops how you can create tutorials how you create lesson plans so if you want to contribute to the platform there's a one stop page with all the information you might need then as I mentioned there is the training team site this is basically our blog our news portal we post information about everything we're doing on here if you go to the site there is a search button just underneath the training knowledges power badge where you can search for any information below that there is an email updates area if you want to get involved in the training team or if you just want to follow what the training team does I recommend subscribing to the email updates the great thing about the email updates is if I post updates to that syllabus in future you'll get those updates in your inbox so that's another good reason to subscribe I just want to highlight two things Adrian says if I knew more I'd join accessibility that's my personal focus Adrian you don't need to know more whatever you bring is great you can learn from that team that's the wonderful part I am learning about training from the training team while I'm a trainer so don't feel like you have to know everything you can learn from the folks in your team and then Mark says and Mark Andrew I know as a contributor and a member of the training team he's hosting online workshops himself co-hosting these online workshops is my favorite part of contributing currently go to learn so much and hang out with good people Mark with your permission I would like to steal that comment and use it in my talk later because that is a great comment I appreciate it thank you so much Ivan says what is a typical venue for in-person WordPress meetups Ivan I'm not the best person to answer that so I'm going to put a pin on that and I will come back to it but let's finish what I'm talking about here and then I'll come back to that question if that's okay alright I will get you okay then there is make WordPress chat this is basically the WordPress Slack instance if you've never used Slack before I understand it was new to me when I first used it but it's a platform that allows you to interact with all the members of the WordPress community I'm going to open my Slack instance here so you can see it this is the training team channel and it's basically just real-time chat folks are communicating back and forth everything is public so don't mind sharing this information you will see here that I mentioned earlier on I'm going to try and find it here quickly now I'm not going to find it, it was too far ago but for example Chiton here said that he's speaking about translation in WordPress and we gave him some suggestions and ideas Mark posted about the new 6.2 release so it's a great way to meet all the folks in the training team see what folks are up to we hold our meetings in Slack you can run Slack in your browser or you can install one of the desktop or mobile apps to access the Slack and it's a great way to get involved and just kind of follow along and see what folks are up to and then lastly on that list we have the GitHub environment now this is something that if you are not going to be contributing content or if you're not going to be contributing code you don't need to worry about the GitHub environment the GitHub is just basically a repository of the source code for learn WordPress as well as where we monitor and track our content production so if I show you I'm going to just move this out the way quickly I'm going to click on the issues over here you will see that there are different types of issues that one is specifically a online workshop issue let me find my online workshop here we go here's my online workshop issue so this is what I used to track my planning for the workshop I keep notes here if I need a if I need a co-host I will I will include the co-host in the section here I just said I don't need a co-host and that's how we track our content but we also track any bugs or issues that we're working on in this environment if you've never used GitHub before that's fine folks in the training team will help you to use it and help you understand how to use it if you want to create content for learn WordPress okay how you can contribute there are many ways as I've said you can create content you can create tutorials you can create listen plans you can run online workshops if you're not comfortable creating content you can review content my friend Mark Andrew is always reviewing my tutorials and I love it because he reviews my tutorials from a non developer background and gives me feedback as to whether he learned what he needed to learn and if he didn't then I failed and I can go back and do it again you can take meeting notes so meetings happen in Slack text wise and then after the meeting somebody will compile the notes and post them to the training team blog that is the easiest thing to do you just make sure you're there for one of the meetings there's one in the APAC time zone and one in the America time zone that alternates I'll show you where those meetings are in a second and you just hang out in the meeting take notes use previous meeting note summaries to compile it put it together and post it and you're good to go you can translate courses or lesson plans if you speak a different language to English if you speak Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, whatever translating that content would be amazing translating tutorial transcripts would be amazing so then we can get it out to folks who speak those languages you can propose new content ideas so here's one where I'm going to cheat outrageously as I mentioned to you earlier I'm going to find that link quickly and open it I've got this where is it now the syllabus posts that I've written I am going to need to at some point create a GitHub issue, a content issue for every item in this list if I can find some willing contributors to come and create those items for me that would be wonderful because then I don't have to do that step and I can focus on the content creation if you have ideas of your own if you think there's a certain knowledge or piece of information that we don't have on WordPress you can go and you can create that content and so that's another way that you can that you can contribute to the project and then finally you can help with administration there are always administrative tasks that need to be done in any of the WordPress teams there are things like reviewing facilitator applications reviewing new content ideas reviewing bugs on the platform there are all kinds of administrative tasks that need to be done so if you're somebody who likes to deal with administrative tasks that's another great way to get involved one way that I haven't added on yet that I that I should add now is you can be a co-host so I generally when I when I run my workshops I reach out to folks in the training team and say I'm looking for a co-host and a co-host will help me manage the chat help me manage the questions help me with numbers and those kind of things another great way that you can that you can get involved there are there are loads of other ways is my point and then finally badges now I did want to include a GIF from the what's the name of that movie somebody helped me out here who knows what I'm talking about it's a Mal Brooks movie Blazing Southerns badges we don't need no stinking badges but I think that that clip is not really comfortable to be used in this day and age so I won't use the GIF but I'll mention it as a joke but yes, you do get what's known as wordpress.org profile badges if you become either a training contributor or a training team member or both and I want to share with you now this is this is a humble brag so I am blowing my own horn a little bit and I do apologize for that but basically once you sign up for your wordpress.org profile which is what you need to take courses you get this profile page that you can create it's kind of like your homepage on wordpress.org you can include a biography you can include your links to where you go and then you get a contribution section and I am I am proud to say that the only two badges that I received after becoming a full-time sponsor were my training team and training contributor badges so I'll brag a little bit about the fact that I did that on my own but I added those two after I joined Automatic as a as a sponsored member of the training team and it's a great way to show that you are part of the community you are involved in the community there are many companies out there who look at these profiles to see whether you're involved in the wordpress community there are many clients that I've that I've worked with that have been impressed by my contribution to the wordpress community so it's a great way to kind of show off your stripes and joining the training team if you're just a contributor and a team member are two different levels contributor is sort of somebody who's giving back creating content those things once you have been a contributor for about a year and you are constantly contributing and you're working with the training team then you can apply for the training team badge which I got about a month ago just after my one year anniversary of rejoining the team okay and that's that that's my bit for today I'm going to I'm going to get back to Ivan's question about meetups in a second but I want to just check if there are any questions around all of the stuff that I've covered today anything anybody wants to know about learning wordpress getting involved in the wordpress getting the content of learn wordpress if not then we'll we'll head over to Ivan's question around around meetup venues oh it's from treasure this area of my dress sorry Kurt I'm getting my Western movies mixed up okay we don't seem to have any questions at this time so I'm going to pop back on over to Ivan's question Ivan said what is a typical venue for an in-person wordpress meetup now Mark has really answered and said coffee shops libraries or any public space is accessible for anyone that's a good answer the big word camps are usually held at big conference centers or hotels that's very very true but I have seen word camps happen at libraries the first word camp in a rarism pub where it happened in a library because it was a free venue and they let folks use it for meetup events depending on so if you're just starting a meetup and you don't have a lot of attendees a coffee shop's a great option and you just kind of organize like a get together coffee and chat get to know the folks libraries are a very good option ideally anywhere that doesn't cost you money but you can get people together and it's a comfortable space and you can then talk about wordpress when you're starting your meetup if you're starting a meetup try not to make it something that costs money to get going because you don't want to put that burden on yourself so a library is a good option maybe you know somebody who has a conference center that they can let you use it for the evening don't worry too much about slides and those things just present a topic and allow folks to learn with you as you grow maybe you start interacting with wordpress companies that might want to sponsor your meetup which is acceptable there are some rules and regulations around that but then you can look at those options the last thing that I want to share with you on that topic is if you go to make I won't spell today make wordpress.org slash community so this is the community team they focus specifically on these kinds of events meetups in person events those kind of things I will share this link in a second there is specifically a I'm going to the handbook page now there is specifically a meetup organizer handbook and the meetup organizer handbook actually discusses the kinds of ways that you can organize meetups plan meetups run meetups and the type of venues to use so I do recommend reading through all of that and there will be lots lots more and better answers than what I just gave you now okay I see that Kurt says being completely tricky here would you recommend viewing some youtube videos first before going over to wordpress resource I would recommend doing both and I'll tell you why the learn wordpress content is tends to be very focused very specific so if you want to learn a specific topic learn wordpress is your answer if you want to see somebody who's doing a bit more of a live build or this is how I do this in the real world environment then the youtube stuff is good and there's actually somebody who is joining the training team currently by the name of Jamie Marsland who does quite a lot of these site builds I don't have his youtube link handy but I'll share it in the meetup comments where he'll take an existing website and he'll build it using the block editor and he'll show you the pushes and the pulls and the breaks and those kind of things the other thing that I would mention is that myself Ryan Welcher who was mentioned earlier and a few others we do wordpress development live streams those are more kind of I want to build something and this is how I build it but that's only sort of slowly kicking off and we're slowly trying to create those as we go forward so I would suggest both I wouldn't say just go learn wordpress I wouldn't say just go youtube the one thing that I would say with learn wordpress is our goal is to be factually correct and to show you what can be done with just core wordpress or free plugins sometimes the youtube videos they're sponsored by a certain plugin and I'm not saying all of them are like this I'm not trying to paint them all with the same brush they sometimes have a sponsor and the sponsor might determine how they how they navigate their content number one number two they're chasing the algorithm so the way they put their content together may not benefit everybody whereas on learn wordpress those of us that are doing this we're not chasing an algorithm we just want to help folks so I would recommend using both awesome Peter says JV is joining trading he will be a great addition absolutely yes Jamie and I had a great conversation the other day about it and we're going to be getting some of his content over and then Mark Andrews is one of the most popular wordpress tutors now is currently teaching wordpress all the videos link up to their products that's so you pre-made wordpress websites which is just a regular wordpress that you start with nothing at it so yes that's kind of that problem that I was talking about where some of the folks on YouTube they're generally trying to upsell their product whereas those of us that are working on learn wordpress we're definitely not I mean I work for automatic the company who owns wordpress.com and I'm not allowed to mention wordpress.com products because I work in the open source team so we're not allowed to mention any any what we might call paid or premium products we've got to focus on the core open source stuff so that's just one thing to note okay that is my bit today I want to thank you all for joining me it was lovely to share the story with you share learn wordpress with you I hope to see some of you in the training team in the near future if you do have any questions this video will be posted to wordpress tv afterwards so if you're watching this on wordpress tv and you have questions please do pop them in the in the comments as I mentioned earlier otherwise enjoy the rest of your Thursday and the rest of your week and your weekend thank you very much