Press This: Improving Learning Pathways on Learn.WordPress.org

Welcome to Press This, the WordPress community podcast from WMR. Each episode features guests from around the community and discussions of the largest issues facing WordPress developers. The following is a transcription of the original recording.

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Doc Pop: You’re listening to Press This, a WordPress community podcast on WMR. Each week, we spotlight members of the WordPress community. I’m your host, Doc Pop, I support the WordPress community through my role at WP Engine and my contributions on Torquemag.io. You can subscribe to Press This on RedCircle, iTunes, Spotify, or your favorite podcasting app. You can also download the episodes directly from WMR.fm. 

And boy, I’m just gonna say I feel like I’m breaking the fourth wall here or whatever, but this is my nighttime voice. It’s 10:00 PM here, and my guest, it’s early in the morning for them. So I’m super excited we were able to make this work.

But I’m just hearing myself and my energy. It’s just different than usual, and I’m gonna go with that. So today I have the privilege of talking with Jonathan Bossenger, a full-time contributor to the WordPress project, sponsored by Automattic. Jonathan is working with the training team on learn.wordpress.org on the launch of Structured Learning Pathways and a Learn WordPress redesign.

Jonathan, how are you doing today?

Jonathan Bossenger: I am doing very well, and may I just say that your nighttime voice is very energetic, so I can only imagine what your daytime voice is like.

Doc Pop: Yeah, it’s a little less perky. It’s a little bassier or something. When I’m editing this, this is gonna be a trip. And, Jonathan, it’s 8:00 AM your time, something like that?

Jonathan Bossenger: Correct.

Doc Pop: And I was just mentioning as we’re recording, it is Super Bowl Sunday here in San Francisco. So, I would have trouble going to sleep anyway with all the fireworks going off. So this is totally fine. So we’re gonna dive into it. 

Like I said, Jonathan, you’ve been working on learn dot WordPress— a couple projects there, and I definitely want to talk about those. But before we get into those, everyone I talk to in WordPress seems to know you, like, personally, they send you correspondence all the time. It seems like you’ve kind of been around the space for a while. Can you tell us about about how you got into WordPress and how long you’ve been in it?

Jonathan Bossenger: Yeah. So, I haven’t been around as long as many other folks in our community. I only joined the— I officially joined the WordPress project around 2015, 2016. I went to my first WordCamp in Cape Town. I met the folks in the local community. There were a bunch of folks visiting from around the world. Pippen was there. Jenny Wong was there, Drew James was there. And I got to meet all these folks and I vividly remember having a conversation with Jenny Wong about contributing to WordPress and how to get involved, which led me to my first contributions to the Documentation team.

At the time, the Documentation team was busy doing a massive migration from the Codex to what is now known as Help Hub and DevHub, you know, all the official documentations on wordpress.org. And my first contribution was literally just copying text from a Codex page into a Google Doc, and then ticking it off in a box somewhere to say that it has been copied into the doc.

So that’s where I got started. I think the reason that a lot of people know me is because I’ve had a fairly public relationship with the WordPress project. I tend to be very interactive. I tend to get involved in conversations. And so I’ve interacted with a lot of folks over the years. I’ve been very blessed to have worked in positions where I’m allowed to interact with folks. So I’ve sort of managed to make a name for myself, if you will, over the last few years.

Doc Pop: And all of that makes sense with what you’re currently working on over at Learn WordPress, it seems like the perfect place for someone who is used to working with other folks and kind of reaching out, being social with them, and helping ease them into the project. It sounded like you had no trouble getting into the WordPress project.

I mean, was there, when you first contributed, were you already very familiar with kind of open source ethos and contributing, or was it a learning experience for you when you first contributed?

Jonathan Bossenger: Only enough. I was very new to the concept of contributing to open source. I knew what open source was from a user or a consumer point of view. I had been working with PHP for a number of years. I’d worked with JavaScript, I’d worked with jQuery I was using the Ubuntu desktop, so I knew about open source. But it was only when I really started talking to people at WordCamp that I understood that there was this concept of contributing back to open source and that contributing back didn’t just mean writing code. That was always the thing that I struggled with the most because I am a developer. I’m writing code all day. The last thing I want to do in my spare time is write more code. And that was the conversation that I had with Jenny, and I said, you know, I want to give back. I want to do something, but at the end of the day, the last thing I wanna do is write code. And she said to me in that conversation, well, there’s docs, there’s, there’s this, there’s that, there’s all these other areas that you can contribute to. Why limit yourself to only contributing to code? And so that’s how that journey started. Getting into that process, I consider myself very lucky that I had that first person to speak to and ask questions of. And when I got started, you know, I signed up for things like. Slack and that kinds of things. There was a name that I could reach out to. And so that’s something I’ve always tried to be for other people, you know, I’ve said this to Jenny many times. She was that person that I could reach out to and ask questions of, and, Hey, where do I find this? And how do I do that? So whenever I meet folks and I sort of invite them to contribute, I always like to be that for them because having that first point of contact is so super important.

Doc Pop: Mm-Hmm. And I wanna talk about the things that you’re excited about right now with the Learn WordPress team. And I wanna make sure also that I hopefully, I might have a habit of sometimes being like, if I’m interviewing you, I might make it sound like this is your thing, but obviously this is the team effort. So feel free to give them shout-outs. Obviously, you will. But for now, I want to talk about the launch of progressive user-friendly learning pathways. What I was a little confused in the terminology there, the learning pathways. Can you describe what you mean by that?

Jonathan Bossenger: Hmm, sure. So—and thank you for mentioning the fact that it is very much a team effort. You know, I am but one person on the team. I’m fortunate that I’m sponsored to do this work, but there is a great group of contributors that are working on all of this and I wanna definitely let them know that they are appreciated.

So learning pathways in late 2022, early 2023, the training team put out a learner survey, an individual learner survey, asking the folks who are using learn.wordpress.org, what is working, what is not working, what do you want to see, what don’t you wanna see? One of the highlights that came out of that survey was that the learning process, the way that we find information, the way that we learn things was very random.

It was very unstructured. There was not a clear pathway for somebody who is either new to WordPress or new to designing with WordPress or new to developing with WordPress where to get started. What are the tools that you need? What are the things that you—what are the bits and pieces? And I’m sure you’ll have seen this, there’s been a big explosion over the last few years of structured courses online, taking you from zero to 10 or to 20 or to a hundred or whatever.

When we say learning pathways, we really just mean a structured process to learn a thing. In the case of Learn WordPress, that thing is either using WordPress as a user, designing with WordPress as a designer or as a theme creator, or developing with WordPress as a plugin developer, as a theme developer, or as a more generalist developer.

So what are the fundamental pieces of information that you need to learn? And then what is the next level on top of that? And then what is the next level on top of that? I always describe it as, if you could send somebody to a WordPress University and they had a two-year diploma or a three-year degree or whatever, what would they learn in year one?

What would they learn in year two? What would they learn in year three? And that’s the information we’re trying to bring together in a more structured way so that anybody learning any level of WordPress knows where to start, knows where they’re going, knows what the end goal is, as opposed to the scattershot random, oh, here’s an interesting thing. Oh, this might be useful to me. I don’t know. Let me figure it out.

Doc Pop: I see that just on the description on your website, you describe yourself as having a focus on developer-related content, and I feel like that’s an example right there where somebody might want to contribute to translations or something, or editing videos or things like that, and they’re all maybe getting funneled in. I’m assuming right now they’re getting funneled into the same thing. Or when they land on Learn WordPress, or if they wanna contribute to Learn WordPress or make WordPress they might have a hard time figuring out the topics if they need to get help.

Because there’s so many different things. Is that maybe what the pathways are that you’re talking about, or am I totally on the wrong page there?

Jonathan Bossenger: No, no, that’s, that’s very much a part of it. Contributing is a perfect example. Let’s say you decide you want to start contributing to WordPress tomorrow. You’ve been using WordPress for a while. You’ve been working with it as a user, as a builder, as an extender, whatever the case may be, and now you want to start contributing.

So you go and you find this thing called Learn WordPress, and you think, okay, I’m gonna learn. There’s gonna be, you would assume there’s going to be, at least a header or a menu item that says start your contribution journey here, and you’re gonna click on it and it’s gonna take you to a series of lessons or a series of videos or a course or something and take you through that process. At the moment for somebody to find that it’s very, very difficult. At the moment, the design is very much focused on what we used to call tutorials and lesson plans, and then the courses are kind of secondary. There, there’s no specific order to them.

They’re just sort of, the most recently published courses. So if you’re somebody who needs to have a specific path ahead of you to get started, you’re going to find it extremely overwhelming. You’re not gonna know where to click around what to do. And as we all know, when things are difficult, when things are overwhelming, then people get tired and they move on.

We had some great feedback from a contributor who joined us at the WordCamp Europe Contributor Day last year. She had just joined the company. And her role was to, I think write about WordPress. I can’t remember exactly what it was, but she was an experienced writer.

She was experienced in putting together content, that kind of thing. But she was brand new to WordPress and she said to me, I’m actually kind of cheating here today. I want to use this time to learn about WordPress. And I said, well, that’s perfect. I’ll tell you what. Here’s Learn WordPress. You want to learn about WordPress?

I’m not gonna tell you where to go. Sit down and tell me if you can learn what you can learn about WordPress by the end of this day. And I mean, contribute today, as you know, is a whole day, and halfway through the day, she said to me. I’m getting lost. I dunno where I need to go. I dunno what I need to do.

I dunno what’s important for me as a learner, as a brand new learner. And that was the feedback and that was kind of the general feeling that we got from a lot of folks is yes, the information is good, the content is great, the quality is great, but the process of how we learn what we’re looking for, how we search for things, how we find things is just not where it needs to be.

And that’s what our focus is on now, is creating these pathways. For users, for contributors, for developers, for whoever that they can sit down in front of Learn WordPress and go, right, today I want to, or at least today, next six months, whatever it is, I want to learn how to do X. What are the things that I need to know to learn that X?

And then we take them along that journey.

Doc Pop: And I think that’s a good spot for us to take a quick break. And when we come back after these commercials, we will continue our conversation with Jonathan Bossenger about improving the learning pathways on Learn WordPress. So stay tuned for more after the short break.

Welcome back to Press this, the WordPress community podcast on WMR. I’m your host, Doc Pop chatting today with Jonathan Bossenger, who just told us about the concept of improving the learning pathways on Learn WordPress, meaning that if you need to learn anything and you go to learn.wordpress.org, you will be able to find that process better than in the past.

Now, this is something that I believe this kind of update to how Learn WordPress worked. I believe it was announced in October of last year. And Jonathan, can you tell us how long do you think this update’s gonna take? Including the web design? The website redesign and how far y’all have gotten so far?

Jonathan Bossenger: As you mentioned, it was announced October last year. It, as I mentioned earlier, it’s something that we’ve been working to get going since the beginning of the year. The current goal of the redesign is obviously part of the process. You know, you can’t have structured content without a structured layout that actually guides the folks where they need to go.

So that is one of the first things that we’re going to be doing. The goal there is to have that redesign and the relaunch happening around midway this year. So June, July this year. At the same time, we would like to be able to have the first set of structured learning pathways up and running as part of that relaunch.

So when I say the first sets, the beginner user learning pathway, the beginner designer learning pathway, and the beginner developer learning pathways, at least. I think there are some more. I think we wanna have some of the intermediate-level ones done as well. I can’t remember that offhand right now, but basically, we want to have that content created, that structured content, created, reviewed, ready to go.

So we’re looking at midway this year, roughly as we’re aiming for the relaunch. As for the rest of it, it’s kind of a big project. It’s kind of a long-term thing, so we’ve kind of given ourselves this year. This year our focus is, you know, the redesign and the learning pathways projects.

So by the end of this year, we’re hoping to have the rest of the learning pathways that we have set up ready to rock and roll. Part of the learning pathways includes contribution learning pathways. We’ve got some courses already that exist around contribution. We wanna bring those in.

So the goal for that to sort of be, I’ll say in big quotes, “wrapped up” is by the end of this year. But it’s definitely an ongoing project. It’s definitely something that I think is going to go into 2025. As we get feedback from the community as to what’s working, what’s not working. But 2024 is our big year, and we’re hoping by the end of 24, 24 at least, the main body of work is done and looking amazing and everybody’s loving it.

Doc Pop: You mentioned earlier that some people have different things they might be looking to learn, and also some people have different ways that they like to learn. And one of the things that comes to mind for me is some people love consuming education through video. And some people hate video especially, I mean, some coders I know actually prefer video.

But it seems like largely, if they’re gonna be a developer and they’re looking for some sort of question, they want to be able to skim text and look around. And I’m just kind of wondering how y’all are figuring that out. Are you focusing just on one or the other? Are you trying to cram, you know, if anything comes out, it has to be in video, audio, and text, what’s your thinking around that?

Jonathan Bossenger: We’re definitely aware of those learners. I personally, myself, am actually the kind of person who prefers a combination of both. So I like to watch a video. And then when it comes to the part of the code that I’m about to write, I like to be able to pause the video and copy that code from somewhere and then stick it in my editor and, and play around with it.

So all of our content is going to have both an audio and a text component. Sorry, not audio, a video component and a text component. So there will be a video that you can watch and go through, and there is an associated text component that goes with that. That is for two reasons.

First of all, because some folks like reading text. And secondly, because it makes the content more accessible. We also have subtitles on all of our videos. And we’re also doing something that is fairly new. We are going to be leveraging the WordPress YouTube account to embed the video into our platform so that we can include chapters.

At the moment, WordPress tv unfortunately doesn’t support chapters, YouTube does. So the content’s going to stay on WordPress tv and those who want to watch the content through that medium can. But we are also sort of syncing it to the YouTube channel, and we’re embedding that YouTube video into Learn WordPress so that we can make use of the chapter. So if you want to jump ahead and you’re just looking for that one specific part of the video, you can go straight there and you can go and use it there.

Doc Pop: Yeah. Chapters are such a cool feature of YouTube. I’ve hacked them in different ways. You can get really creative with them, but even if you’re just being straight-up like instructional, they’re very great. People can go to the description underneath the video and click to the point that they want.

Or as they’re watching the video, if you kind of mouse over the timeline, you’ll sort of see the chapter split up. So if you’re already kind of familiar with the concept that’s being introduced, and you can just skip over that, like two minutes of introduction and just skip into the first part of that.

One other thing, Jonathan, this is we’re really in the weeds, but I just love hacking on YouTube. Some people are using subtitles and they’re adding annotations and corrections to their videos by using clinging on. So YouTube supports clinging on for subtitles. And I don’t think it’s an accessibility issue.

I’m very sorry if this is not the case, but I think that some people playing around with accessibility with, subtitles using clinging on to be like, oh, I misspoke. It’s actually this or whatever. It’s a really clever hack and I don’t see y’all…

Jonathan Bossenger: Very clever.

Doc Pop: It’s, it’s very cool. Because, I mean, with YouTube that’s one of the downsides is you put a video up and you gotta point to it, but you can’t edit it. The only thing you can do is crop out stuff. You can trim it, but you can’t go back and like, upload a different version with like, you know, different audio where you say the name correctly or something, right, it’s like kind of permanent. If you want to not have to change the…where everything’s…okay. We are in the weeds, Doc. Come back. All right. So, you, we talked about the pathways and how people are learning.

There’s some redesign stuff on wordpress.org that we’ve seen in different places. Have we already kind of seen some of the Learn redesign?

Jonathan Bossenger: So I’m gonna be perfectly honest with you, my focus has been on content, so I followed the redesign conversation sort of tangentially. But it’s not something I’ve made a point of focusing on. I kind of, when I see an update, I’ll make a comment and I’ll you know, sort of have my two cents here and there. As to the best of my knowledge, there is a design thread. If you go to the make wordpress.org slash training site, so the training team site, and you click on the Learning Pathways project, there is in that thread somewhere in one of the comments, there is a link to the design which is currently on Figma, I think it is.

So it is there, we are obviously discussing it. There is also, as you’ve rightly mentioned, there have been some redesign things going on in the rest of the WordPress project. We recently had the documentation redesign that was launched. So that is the redesign. The way the redesign is working is we are requesting certain things and then the design folks are coming back and saying, well, we need to not allow certain things because it’s gotta stick with it, you know, the new design and the new layout and those things. So it is there, I don’t have the link. Oh, wait, I’ve got the link here so I can send it to you if you wanna pop it into show notes so it is out there. Folks can come and see it and comment on it.

But it’s not something that we have had a lot of posts about, because we are still in the process of getting to a point where we have what we want as a team in terms of learning pathways and the design folks are happy with the design that it matches the rest of the site. So there are some links there that you can go and check out, but nothing as actively public has been happening with the design in terms of conversations as has been doing with the content. So you have to just go and find that markup and go through there.

Doc Pop: Well, that’s a good spot for us to take one more break, and when we come back, we’re gonna wrap up our conversation with Jonathan Bossenger. I’m gonna switch gears a little bit and talk about video games and about a WordPress video game if we have time. So stay tuned for more after the short break.

Welcome back to Press This, a WordPress community podcast. I’m your host, Doc Pop. Today I am talking to Jonathan Bossenger. So far, we’ve been talking about learning and how to improve Learn WordPress, learn.wordpress.org. And after all that, I just want to switch gears a little bit and relax. I love video games.

I love talking about video games, and I was really happy to see a project that Jonathan, you made called Dodge that combines WordPress with video games, and when I say combines WordPress, you literally built a video game using the WordPress Interactivity API, right?

Jonathan Bossenger: Yes, that’s correct. Not, not only the Interactivity API, but also the Custom Post Type API and a few other internals.

Doc Pop: You know, it just occurred to me, we mentioned BuddyPress briefly. You could even integrate into BuddyPress for your high scores. Maybe there could be like a forum. We could, but then you gotta get into content moderation. Nevermind. This is a terrible idea. Forget that. That’s the worst idea I’ve ever had.

Jonathan Bossenger: But buddy, you say you say that though. But my next, my next gaming project that I’m thinking about doing is something that I want to be a bit more social and BuddyPress is the perfect platform to build that on. So it’s definitely not something that I haven’t thought about.

Doc Pop: The game that you built and we will include the link in the description, but I think they can probably also find it on your website, which we’ll tease at the end of the show. But it’s JonathanBossenger.com. 

The game is called Dodge and you play the WordPress logo and you are trying to avoid the logos of other CMSs and you use the WASD or the arrow keys, I believe.

So, you know, keyboard control and just trying to move around and every 10 seconds the game gets slightly more difficult. I think every sense seconds, everything speeds up. By X percent probably, and maybe more logos get added. But that’s the fundamental game. And there’s a record tracking score where you can see the top players for each day.

Jonathan, before we get into how this was built, have you seen anyone taking advantage of the name screen, getting a high score, and like plugging their plugin or anything like that?

Jonathan Bossenger: So I definitely have seen folks and I expected this because the process of submitting your high score is simply a WordPress REST, API mission. It is not behind any kind of authentication other than the specific user that I’ve created to submit it. But because I’m using the REST API, any kind of cross-site scripting that might be attempted is automatically cleaned up by core WordPress functionality. So I have seen some folks try and submit, you can see they’re kind of trying to submit something to try and inject some JavaScript or something like that, and I have seen that. I’ve also seen folks use it to effectively just get the best high score for that day. And there is a little bit of an algorithm to the high scores that if you play it enough, you’ll be able to work it out. But I can see straight away when somebody is trying to hack the high score, if you will. So I just, I just unpublish those high scores.

And so, yes, it has been interesting to see. I don’t judge folks who do it, but I do find it interesting that there are some folks that do try and just get the high score for the day.

Doc Pop: Yeah. It’s interesting you mentioned the hacking. Obviously hacking something like this is always fun to do and you’re building a product and being like, Hey, look at the weird way I’m tweaking this. And then people like me are like, oh, I wonder how I can break that. Is there, when working with the WordPress Interactivity API, did you find that there are things that people need to watch out for in terms of, like you mentioned injecting CSS. Are there things people need to watch out for when they’re working with this? Like, did you learn anything that you wouldn’t do again, I guess when building this?

Jonathan Bossenger: The interesting thing about using the Interactivity API was, it was purely a bit of chance that it all worked out. I was just running a workshop because one of the things that I do is I run workshops about upcoming WordPress releases. And I’m gonna be doing a few of those soon for, for 6.5. And the Interactivity API has been something that I’ve known about for awhile. And I knew that it was going to possibly be included in 6.5, so I thought it’d be a good idea to get into it and understand how it works. Fortunately, the Interactivity API doesn’t do any kind of storing of data or posting of data or anything like that.

It literally just allows certain interactive elements on a page, on a block, or whatever the case may be. But I was very glad that some time ago, I’d actually done a workshop around WordPress user roles and capabilities. And so when I built the user that allows you to post your high score, I was able to implement those user roles and those capabilities correctly, and sort of only allow someone to post that data.

And the great thing was, because I was using the REST API and posting it through the REST API, I didn’t have to worry about any sanitization. The REST API handled that all for me. So just by using, and I’m sure you’ve said this before, to many folks, you know, don’t write something when you can use a core API. So just by using those core APIs, I was able to ensure that the game was secure.

Doc Pop: Mm-Hmm. Well, that’s a great spot for us to wrap up today. Jonathan, I really appreciate your time. I really appreciate you getting up early and setting some time. I enjoyed chatting with you. If people wanna learn more about what you’re working on, what’s a good spot for them to be able to follow you?

Jonathan Bossenger: The best place to find me is on my website my blog, jonathanbossenger.com, which you’ve already mentioned. I am on Twitter. I will not call it anything else at John underscore Bossenger. I am also on Mastodon. But I think I’m on the Foster on Network and I can’t remember what my name is, but you can find me there.

But all my links to my social media accounts are all on my homepage, so you can find them all there. And otherwise, if you wanna ask me anything about what we’re doing with Learn WordPress or anything else like that, the best place to find me is in the WordPress Slack. Because I spend a lot of my time there and I always welcome folks to connect with me there.

Doc Pop: And I also wanna give a shout-out to your podcast. I believe it’s opensourcerypodcast.com. And I look forward to hearing more of those. Did, did I get that? 

Jonathan Bossenger: Yes. I do believe that is correct. I’m actually just checking now as we speak. Yes, it’s basically a relaunch of a podcast that I was running a number of years ago. It used to be called the WP Hacker. I opened it up to be more sort of open source focus. So there’s three episodes there already from about two years ago, and I’ve got one in the pipeline and one that I’m busy trying to set up. So I, like you, I also like speaking to people in the open source space. And so that’s where my podcast comes from.

Doc Pop: Right on. Well, it’s been great speaking with you. Thank you so much, Jonathan. And thanks to everyone who’s listened. Next episode we are gonna be talking to Chris Messina, the creator of hashtags and we’re gonna be talking about something kind of surprising and interesting, I think for WordPressers.

So stay tuned for that. Thanks for listening to Press This, a WordPress community podcast on WMR. You can follow my adventures on Twitter at The Torque Mag, but the best place to follow us is TorqueMag.io, where you can find transcribed versions of each of these podcasts as well as tutorials and more.

So that’s TorqueMag.io. You can subscribe to Press This on RedCircle, iTunes, Spotify, wherever you get your podcast. I’m your host, Dr. Popular. I support the WordPress community through my role at WP Engine, and I love spotlighting members of that community each and every week on Press This. 

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