Chris Lema on optimizing the next ten years of WordPress.
Donde está el baño?
Tens of thousands of students in the United States walk into classrooms every Fall to learn a new language for the first time. It’s the first day of Spanish 101 or French 101 and all they know is if they practice enough, they may learn a new language.
Unfortunately, the curriculum for those classes is always the same – as students learn some simple things first: like introducing themselves, or asking where the bathroom is.
What happens next has been happening for decades.
Armed with just a little bit of information, they go out into the world to try their newfound language skills on others.
Hola, me llamo Juan. Dónde está el baño?
And that’s when they discover the harsh realities of knowing just enough to be dangerous. They can’t understand the answer.
Think about it for just a second. Imagine you were in a foreign land, had to really visit the bathroom, and all you could muster was the question you learned years before.
Wouldn’t you be frustrated with your ability to ask but not understand an answer?
Recent grads face the same challenge
Computer science majors graduate from universities every year and learn the same harsh truth as they start their first programming job.
They know just enough to be dangerous. And soon enough they face the cold reality that they may have learned enough to ask a question, but not enough to understand an answer.
WordPress noobs face the same challenge
In the WordPress community, we’re seeing rapid growth, as “WordPress” becomes a common, almost-household word. Some research suggests that four of every ten people under 40 have heard of and are familiar with WordPress.
That rapid growth creates a broad group of folks entering at the fringe who know enough to ask questions, but not necessarily understand the answers.
WordPress developers face the same challenge
Of course it’s easy to assume the problem is that these people don’t know WordPress. Surely after enough time in the community, they’ll know enough to ask and answer questions.
Until you read about plugins that have security challenges, or are memory hogs. Until a host decides they won’t support a plugin because it’s poorly authored.
Then you realize that developers face the same challenge. Many of the people who author code in the community didn’t get computer science degrees or come from years of working in other languages.
They backed their way into WordPress because of how easy it was to learn and adopt. They learned how to create a “Hello World” plugin; much like that student learned how to ask where the bathroom was in another language.
But now they’re hip deep into developing software and they’re not sure what questions to ask, and if they did, they’re not sure they’d understand the answers.
It’s an educational challenge
The reality is that if we’re going to see WordPress last another ten years, we’re going to have to make sure three things happen – and they’re all related to education.
We need to guarantee that people’s first experience with WordPress is as easy as it was when we first started with it.
This is actually not as simple as it sounds. When we got started with it, there were less features (and with it, less complexity).
We’ve had the luxury of adapting with each change over the years – a kind of gradual change some of us didn’t even notice.
And we learned WordPress long ago – which limits our ability to remember those first few hours.
So our education for noobs has to be one focused on the first minutes. We have to focus on making sure that we keep the simple things simple (even as we’ve made some complex things simple).
We need to ensure that people have a learning path beyond the first few minutes or hours that help them explore and discover the richness of the platform (from plugins & themes to resources) and its community.
We often embrace the flexibility we get from the WordPress platform, with so many plugins available. But we forget that when there are 27 different comment plugins, that also means there are 0 comment plugin decisions made by new folks.
They don’t know and have never been taught a framework for selection criteria, nor do they know who to trust in the community, because honestly, they don’t know who’s in and who’s out of the community.
So we need to create simple ways for them to discover the community in all of its fullness.
We need to help the transition a person takes from user, to power user, to programmer, to vendor.
What we’ve seen over and over is that people often embrace the platform, and slowly migrate from user to vendor. But the path is always unique and there are tons of hurdles along the way.
Frankly, there’s no reason for that. We’ve all done it enough. We ought to be able to create a path that reduces the burden and stress.
A modest proposal
The dynamics in a community when people try software and find it too difficult to learn, use, or maintain has always been the same. In the end, it’s replaced with something else.
There’s no question WordPress has lasted a decade. That’s a fact. The question that remains is whether it has the wherewithal to last another ten.
Given that the challenges we face are educational in nature, there is no reason that we can’t resolve ourselves to create a method and strategy for bringing that education to the growing community.
- We would need it to be local.
- We would need it to fluid.
- We would need it to engage the community.
- We would need leadership from the community.
- We would need it to be recurring and regular.
And it turns out we already have a vehicle that meets all those criteria. It’s called a WordPress meetup.
Today, those meetups move in a variety of directions, managed in a lot of different ways, and there’s not a distinct curriculum being used.
But that doesn’t mean they couldn’t be leveraged.
What if we developed a curriculum that could help people learn to ask the right questions?
What if we developed a curriculum that could help people understand the answers?
As a community, we’d know a lot.
We’d even know que el baño está alla.
Chris Lema is the VP of Software Engineering at Emphasys Software, where he manages high performers and oversees product development and innovation. He’s also a blogger, ebook author and runs a WordPress meetup in North County San Diego. His coaching focuses on helping WordPress businesses, or businesses wanting to leverage WordPress.
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