Help me develop a curriculum for a Wordpress course
September 4, 2010 11:37 PM   Subscribe

I'm creating and teaching a course on Wordpress. If you were paying to watch my videos, what would you hope to find in such a course?

I'd like to hear both from people who know nothing about Wordpress, (what your expectations would be, your interests, hopes, confusions) and I'd also from people with some (or a lot) of experience with Wordpress, what you wish you'd learned earlier, what you still want to know, etc... Feel free to be as general, vague, broad, or specific as you want.
posted by brenton to Computers & Internet (10 answers total)
 
If you were paying to watch my videos, what would you hope to find in such a course?

There's the rub... are you sure there is a market for this out there? If I was learning wordpress I would assume that all the tutorials and help I wanted would be out there for free.

No other you can work out to make the $$$? Advertising?
posted by Meatbomb at 5:07 AM on September 5, 2010


developer or user focused?
posted by Mick at 5:19 AM on September 5, 2010


I've been using WordPress since well before version 1.0, and over the years there have been times I almost hired help, or followed a course had there been one. Mostly because WordPress can work with plugins, and I hardly ever like the output such plugins produce.

One awful plugin I used, made an alphabetical index, with the post titles split by their first letter, and took ages much too long to produce a result. Which could well be, because it send thousands of queries to the database.

Right now I am having problems with the way WordPress can handle extra taxonomies. It is easy to put the extra metadata in the database. But there is not a lot documentation about getting it out again, since WordPress's taxonomy only has a few preprepared functions compared to the category or tag functions.

Still, I code myself, without having the basic training to do so. And without having much use for that knowledge in other ways, so getting the basic training in generic PHP or whatever is not much use.

I probably would pay for a WordPress PHP course, and making my own functions, and getting a basic knowledge of what's already there.
posted by ijsbrand at 5:28 AM on September 5, 2010


i would expect to be able to download it and put it on my ipod - i would expect to be able to download a zipfile of all of the videos in the course, instead of downloading one by one
posted by mrmarley at 5:45 AM on September 5, 2010 [1 favorite]


First of all I would like the material to be quite modular. I suspect that your prospective audience contains some who would like to know more about the "GUI" aspects of the product (but who are a bit phobic about anything that looks like code) and others who think of themselves as developers and who are interested in starting where the first group trail off. So one possibility would be to divide your material into 3 groups: stuff for the "users", stuff for the "developers" and stuff for both.

In all cases I think that people are only really going to learn if they are able to get some hands-on experience with their own development environment. The best way of doing this is often to give people one or more "projects" which start out with basic exercises and then build on them to show more complex features. Each exercise should start with an explanation of the points that you are going to ask people to cover - then a space where they are asked to try things out for themselves. In a classroom this would be the point where people start to try things and get into trouble with a few fundamental errors. Since you will not be there to help them at this point it would make sense to try to anticipate some common problems and include answers to them in a "troubleshooting" section. Finally you should give people working examples that show the exercise completed properly.
posted by rongorongo at 5:48 AM on September 5, 2010 [1 favorite]


Is it from a user, or developer perspective?

I've been a Wordpress "user" for a long time and, despite a decent working knowledge of HTML, I've never put together a theme. So that's what I'd love to know how to do.
posted by Mwongozi at 5:53 AM on September 5, 2010


Just a little wordpress experience here, and it's a couple of years old now. It didn't end well.

Knowing upfront that a default install isn't particularly secure, and how to correct that, would have left me much happier.
posted by Ahab at 8:02 AM on September 5, 2010


n-thing, "Who's the audience you want to serve?" Figure that out, then you can understand how they might use WordPress from beginning to advanced.
posted by artlung at 8:29 AM on September 5, 2010


Response by poster: This is for Educator.com, so I don't have influence on the way it is distributed or the income model, but the target audience is probably going to be students who are already paying the monthly Educator fee for access to all courses. (I can't imagine too many would purchase a subscription just for the computer science parts, it's more likely they needed help with Calculus and have a marginal interest in Web Development as well. )

So this is definitely not for people who are already computer gurus and are looking for pro-tips on creating their own themes or contributing to the Wordpress codebase, but that doesn't mean that all of the people who use the course are going to be completely new to computers or programming, or even Wordpress.
posted by brenton at 12:16 PM on September 5, 2010


One specific thing that I would like to see is an overview of the best-of-breed plugins for each particular category. This seems to be something that's not easy to find right now. Say I want to add a contact form / image gallery / newsletter to a WordPress website. I can go to the plugin repository and find a dozen different plugins for each of those jobs, but it often takes me quite a bit of time to figure out which one to use.

What I'd love to see is an article/video that says "As of today, the best contact form plugin is A. Here's why. However, if you have particular use case X then you should use plugin B instead. And if you're stuck using an older version of WordPress then use plugin C"
posted by primer_dimer at 2:20 AM on September 6, 2010


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