The Refresh of Learn WordPress: New Directions & Community Growth

Abha:
Hello, and welcome to the WordPress Way at Do the Woo. I’m Abha Thakor, your host for today’s show, which is part of our series to support your WordPress learning journey and encourage you more into WooCommerce. I’m joined today by Laura Adamonis, Nick Diego, and Kathryn Presner. Welcome. Our contributors today are people that you may have met in other places like me. They all contribute to the WordPress training team. If you haven’t heard about that yet, you’ll want to join it by the end of the show. We have some new developments to share with you, designed to make learning and using WordPress so much easier. If you’re a beginner or intermediate WordPress user, or simply would like a refresher on discovering new features, then today’s panel will be able to help. Today, the panel is representing contributors who’ve worked on the free, open-source resource learn.wordpress.org, which first went live in 2000 contributors.

This latest piece of work, which includes a completely refreshed website, has come from across the world, including New Zealand, Japan, South Africa, Asia, Europe, and North America. This latest project also builds on the cross-team and multidisciplinary working that learn.wordpress.org has been fostering since its original launch. We’ve now got progressive and user-friendly learning pathways, all tailored to different types of learners and different levels. We’re going to go, first of all, to Kathryn, who’s based in Canada, and she’s going to tell us a little bit more about why these learning pathways are so important and, more importantly, how you can use them. Over to you, Kathryn.

Kathryn:
Hey, thank you. I am super excited to share what learning pathways are and how they’re going to help people with their WordPress journeys. The idea is that we have these learning pathways geared to different types of folks working with WordPress. Right now, we have pathways for users, people who run their own site or run a site for an organization or a company. And we’ve got other pathways for developers, people who work with the code side of WordPress, and in the future, we’ll also have pathways for designers and contributors. The idea is that within each of these pathways, you will have specific courses for people at the beginner level, people at an intermediate level, and people at an advanced level. So you can jump in depending on your area of interest and where you are in the WordPress world and take a journey. If you’re starting from scratch, you could start at the beginner level. If you’re more intermediate, you can jump into one of those courses and follow step-by-step, walking you through all the key things to learn in that area. So if you want, I can give you an example of one of the specific learning pathways, whatever you like.

Abha:
That would be great, Kathryn. Do talk us through that.

Kathryn:
Sure. One of the popular pathways so far is beginner WordPress user. This is something that is super useful for anyone who’s just starting out with WordPress and wants to create their own site. Or, for example, let’s say you start working at an organization, and part of your duties at that organization is to manage the site that the organization has, and you’ve never worked with WordPress before. You can dive into this course, and it’s divided into different sections called modules. You can get started learning about the basics of WordPress, everything from how to install a theme, what is a plugin, familiarizing yourself with the WordPress interface, understanding what to do, the basics of WP admin, using the media library, the basics of site editing, and the basics of content creation. There’s even a section introducing security, spam, and backups, and SEO. These are things that we don’t go into in depth in the beginner course, but it gives you a taste of each thing and provides a good basis for getting started. From there, you can move on and dive even deeper into some of those topics.

Abha:
It is a really comprehensive guide, and I think for anybody wanting to start off with WordPress, that new beginner pathway really does work. But, of course, like most things on learn.wordpress.org, and in fact the whole WordPress.org project, they are things that we can build on. They are what the community has asked for, but more importantly, they are made by the community for the community. The learning pathways also build on the work with the Individual Learner survey, which was led by Wes and I last year, and we featured that previously on Do the Woo. More importantly, we are very grateful for all the help we had with getting feedback through our Do the Woo audience. The demand has shown that people want goal-oriented learning that could be segmented by roles and skill levels. It also showed the need for that one-stop, trusted source where users can augment, refresh, and have a clear pathway through to other learning or to more in-depth WordPress learning. I’m going to go to you now, Nick. As a developer relations advocate and also from your other work and contributions to things like the developer blog in WordPress, how do you think the refreshed Learn WordPress site really addresses these needs? How does it provide that one-stop shop which can be trusted?

Nick:
Yeah, so I think that previously, or even today, there’s so much information out on the web on how to learn to use WordPress, whether you’re a developer or a user, and you search into Google, and you can find all sorts of resources. The redesign and restructuring of Learn WordPress provide a source of learning information that’s being built by contributors to WordPress that ideally is going to be the most up-to-date, most comprehensive. This is the place that you can send people to learn whether you’re a user or developer. A lot of my work focuses on improving developer documentation and also, as you mentioned, writing tutorials and guides on the developer blog. What we’re going to start to see is a much tighter connection between those resources and Learn because they both should go hand in hand. The Learn resources reference the documentation, and the documentation can then reference the courses that developers can follow if they’d like a more structured learning environment. I’m really excited to see that close connection as we move forward because we’re seeing such a great improvement with Learn, and we’re also seeing a lot of improvement with documentation as well.

Abha:
So, are there any losses with this site, Nick? Will people still be able to join online workshops or have a way of learning together with other people?

Nick:
Absolutely. I think that there are many different ways that folks learn. One of the contributions that I do quite a bit is a series called Developer Hours, where we have these online learning workshops where people come and learn about a specific topic. But again, those topics in that live environment are going to reference documentation and Learn courses. So, it’s kind of like this nice big collection of different ways that people can learn, but they all feed off one another and support one another as well.

Abha:
And I guess that’s one of the highlights—not just about where the project is at the moment, but also how, as a community, we’ve grown to the extent that all that crosswork really can happen, does happen, and we can continue to build on it. That takes me over to Laura. Laura, you’re one of the current team reps for the training team. Just share what the training team does for people who are not familiar and are listening today.

Laura:
So, the training team is the bones of the Learn WordPress learning materials. We are the creators, the teachers, the editors, the reviewers, and the researchers that pull all the information together to provide a lesson or an online workshop so that we can present the material to our beginners, our intermediates, and we’re looking for some advanced people too. We don’t have as many in that realm, but it’s great to have a group that works together to pull these resources for learn.wordpress.org.

Abha:
Thanks, Laura. With this current site, because it’s had lots of work done to it on Learning Pathways, which we’re going to talk more about in a few moments as well, what are the key wins for the user in terms of search?

Laura:
Yeah, I’m super excited about that because I’ve only been using WordPress for two and a half years. I’m still in the beginner stage, I feel like, and that was one of the things that I’m excited about—the navigation and search. To be able to go in and search up the word “style book,” which is still new to people, I searched that up earlier, and there are four or five different things that popped up lesson-wise that you can do individually or, like Kathryn said, as part of the learning pathway course. So that’s a definite improvement. There are still some things that we can improve upon for filtering, but I’m so happy to see that we’re heading in the right direction for the search.

Abha:
And of course, there’s lots of opportunities for people to help with that, isn’t there?

Laura:
Oh, definitely. Yes, please come help us. For any amount of time—an hour a week can make a big difference—whether fixing a bug or finding something that just doesn’t work. Just testing the site for us and filling out a feedback form is a great help.

Abha:
And we’re going to have some of these links in the show notes as part of your learning journey here on Do the Woo. If you want to get started, we’ll be able to signpost you to ways to do that. I’m going to jump back to Nick for a moment. Nick, in terms of the new, refreshed site, is it now easier to pop into a course or module on a mobile device?

Nick:
That’s

a good question. Yeah, so the redesign of the site—part of the work done there was to standardize the underlying architecture to work off of a block theme. So all the improvements that we’re seeing in WordPress, that are being developed with each new release, this website will now be able to take advantage of those things. Previously, it was not a block theme, so I want to say yes, it is a much better mobile experience, but it will also get better as WordPress improves. Previously, it was not a block theme; it wasn’t taking advantage of some of those improvements. So, it’s an architecture that is great, and we all love the redesign and how far we’ve gotten here, but this is really only the beginning because it’s a much more solid framework with which to add more functionality, build more things in the future, and optimize various aspects. So, I’m very excited about where we can go from here, given the architectural improvements that have been done.

Abha:
That’s great, Nick. And do you think that because it’s a block theme, it’s a great way for people to actually learn or be introduced to that kind of block, particularly those who want to start a WooCommerce shop and don’t really know about categories and things like that? Would you signpost this as a way of understanding that better?

Nick:
Yeah, I think so. One of the cool things is that if you’re following one of these learning pathways and learning about the query loop block, the search page and the course page, and the lesson page, they are powered by the query loop block. So you could literally open up the inspector in your browser and actually see that block markup that you’re learning about in these courses. Now, the query loop block is also used in WooCommerce and things like that. I think that because the theme is built with blocks and you’re learning about building with blocks, there’s a nice harmony there. Furthermore, this is an open-source project. The site, the theme that is powering the site, is open-source. So, if you are more developer-oriented, you can go to the GitHub repository and actually see how the site was architected for Learn, which I think is just another great resource to see how people are building block themes for very high-traffic sites—Learn is a very high-traffic site in the WordPress.org infrastructure. So yeah, I’m very excited about it personally.

Abha:
There’s nothing like deconstructing a site and being able to see how you put it all back together. And of course, with WordPress, you can play, run it on a test site, and even more so, you can join one of the numerous release parties that happen a couple of times a year, where you can test some of the new features, look at what Gutenberg is doing with the items that have been brought into core. So if you haven’t done that already, do check out some of our release podcasts, where all the links to how you can get involved with testing, how you can see what the new features are like ahead of time, and also input into them are provided. Kathryn, I’m going to delve a bit deeper now into these learning pathways. I remember when we moved from the individual learning survey to lots of charts on different platforms, looking at how the pathways would and could be created, what they should be called, how different learners approach things. Going back into the feedback, there was a lot to cover. Now I know not all the things have been implemented so far. Is there a plan for what happens next in terms of learning pathways?

Kathryn:
Well, the two imminent things that happen next are two more pathways that are going to be added. The next one in the user area is going to be advanced WordPress user. That way, we’ll have the full beginner, intermediate, and advanced user pathway complete. On the developer side, the next pathway that’s going to be worked on is intermediate plugin developer because right now, we have beginner WordPress developer, which covers the basics that any developer should know and sort of gives you the building blocks to move on to maybe specialize in theme development or plugin development. We have the intermediate theme developer pathway already created, and it was Cynthia Norman, a community member, who worked on that one. But next up will be the intermediate plugin developer pathway, and there’s actually a call for contributors for that because it’s going to be a nice, big, meaty pathway, and it’s going to take a lot of work to put it together.

So, Jonathan Bossenger from the training team has put out a specific call for folks with a development background to help put that together. And that’s actually interesting because you don’t necessarily have to do work on creating actual lessons. If you are interested in video editing, for example, you can step in and help out with editing videos that other people have created. Or maybe you’re interested in voiceovers and want to record the voiceover for one of these lessons, or maybe you want to review another lesson that someone else created. So, with that pathway that’s coming up, that’s a great opportunity for people with lots of different skills to jump in and get involved. Beyond that, in 2025, will be the next pathways in the two areas I mentioned earlier: pathways for designers and pathways for contributors who want to contribute to the project itself. That’s sort of like a meta path, if you will—not meta in the sense of the WordPress meta team, but meta in the sense of pathways about contributing to the project on any of the teams. So those are things to look out for, and if people are interested in any of those areas, that’s somewhere they could step in and get involved.

Abha:
Thanks, Kathryn. I think, as we’ve said at the beginning of this show today, that we are only representing some of the very, very many contributors that have been involved even in the beginner’s cycle of this project. There’s a huge number of contributors who took part, and not all of them at the same time. One of the great things about training is that you can actually take part at different time zones. I’m just going to go over to Laura to tell us a little bit more about how people would navigate through getting involved. Where do they start? How would they actually get involved if their time zone is not the same as the meeting, particularly on the learning pathways?

Laura:
Okay, great. I’d be happy to point everyone in the right direction. If we go to make.wordpress.org/training, you’ll find our homepage, where we have our current focus areas. If you open up the welcome box, you’ll find the basic getting started link. We have done our own lesson on how to get started, and we walk you through setting that up. It is a self-guided onboarding program, and we also have a guided program that’s run by Kathryn. We try to match people up if they’d like to go through the guide program with a mentor. You meet with that mentor a couple of times to get one-on-one or maybe a group presentation of where to go and what you’re interested in. We do use GitHub, and sometimes that can be a little confusing. That was brand new for me, so I was a little scared about that. I didn’t want to break the site by clicking on the wrong button. So, having people within our team to walk you through is really beneficial on that aspect of it. The other part of your question was how to get involved with the learning pathways. That is really easy by going to learn.wordpress.org. As we said, the site is really clean and user-friendly now. Right at the top, in the second navigation, there’s Learning Pathways. When you click on that, you have either Develop with WordPress or Start with WordPress. You can also scroll down the page, and there’s a Get Started section that also has those two links that will start you on those two pathways.

Abha:
Thanks, Laura. We can also put some of these links in our show notes, but if you’re not sure and want us to help you connect with one of these wonderful panelists today, just message us on Do the Woo. Connect with us on one of our social media channels, and we’ll be glad to signpost you and connect you to the right people. One of the things as a trainer that I’m particularly pleased to see is that we have not just a journey going in one direction—we have learning pathways that can go in multiple directions. In modern-day training, that reinforcement of learning is a key part of how lessons and learning take place outside WordPress. I’m going to go to Kathryn on this. In terms of the structure, you’ve got modules, courses, lessons, but also you’ve got the pathway at the beginning and the pathway at the end. You can also jump in and do single module refreshers. Could you share a little bit more, with some examples, of the kind of single modules that are likely to be popular or that you’ve already had feedback on as being very useful?

Kathryn:
Sure. I love the fact that everything is very accessible in terms of being able to hop in and out of a section of a course. The sections are modules, as you mentioned. For example, let’s say you are a WordPress developer, but you’ve never touched themes before—maybe you’re a plugin developer, but you’d like to get a little more understanding of WordPress themes. Well, you could jump right into Beginner WordPress Developer and go to the module on Introduction to Developing WordPress Themes. You don’t have to take the whole course because all of these sections are previewable. In other words, you don’t even have to log in. Another cool thing we did was make all these learning pathways available even before you’ve logged in. You can hop in, preview these lessons within a module like Developing WordPress Themes, or you can take the course and just do that section. In the section on Developing WordPress Themes, you’ll learn about theme structure, style sheets,

templates, global settings, and the Create Block Theme plugin. That’s a good grounding in the basics of WordPress themes. You might say, “Hey, wow, this is really cool. Let me move right on to Intermediate Theme Development,” and you can skip everything else in the Beginner Developer pathway because you already know that stuff. That’s one possible example of how someone could hop in and use a chunk of that course.

Abha:
Has there been a course or a lesson or an area that has been particularly popular, and that you think people who haven’t tried WordPress before should start with?

Kathryn:
I think the Beginner WordPress User pathway is the most popular one so far. It is one of the first ones that came out, but I think a lot of people have jumped in there. It’s just a really great area to dive in and get started if you’re completely new to WordPress because, like I mentioned before, you’re going to have sections on just a little bit of everything. It’ll give you a good grounding on how everything works. So I think that’s one that’s been very, very popular, and we’ve gotten a lot of good feedback on it so far.

Abha:
I think we’ll link to that as well and highlight it on our social media too. Thanks, Kathryn. Nick, I’m going to come over to you. From a beginner dev’s perspective, we’re encouraging them with releases to look at documentation, the Field Guide, to keep up with the Developer Hours that you’ve shared already, and also the developer blog. How do Learn WordPress materials really fit into that, and how can they get a joined-up sense that works for them?

Nick:
I think entering the WordPress space as a developer who’s never been involved with WordPress before can be quite overwhelming. There’s a lot of content, a lot of resources, a lot of different things that you can pay attention to and focus on—so much so that it can become overwhelming and may lead people to move away from WordPress or something like that. Learn provides this place where you can go, pick a learning pathway, and just follow it. As you follow it, you know you’re getting a complete overview of what the people who built the learning pathway think you need to know about WordPress development—and they did a great job of that. Once you get through that course, then you can start attending Developer Hours, diving into some more complicated documentation with the context that the course provides. I think that the courses and learning pathways provide that really great first step to then start consuming the other content in the WordPress space so you don’t get overwhelmed. Some people might just want to dive in and get their hands dirty, but I think that the courses provide a very great entry point for developers, especially those who are new to WordPress.

Abha:
Nick, do you think that Learn.WordPress.org can become that one-stop shop for intermediate and advanced developers in the near future, or are we talking about a longer cycle?

Nick:
Well, I think that the learning pathways we have so far are great, and I think they cover a lot. I don’t think, given the amount of content—there’s so much to know around WordPress—you could probably spend years of your life just learning about building custom blocks, focusing on a very small area of WordPress. So I don’t expect that Learn WordPress will be able to cover absolutely everything, but I think it can provide people with a really good foundation for WordPress development. From there, they can maybe read a really niche article on the developer blog about a very specific topic related to block development, but it provides you with that foundation to then consume other more complicated pieces of content that you might see elsewhere.

Abha:
I think it does, and I think all these things are increasingly working together. I know part of my role in the editorial group for the developer blog is to look at what is out there that matches this, what matches documentation, and what matches online. So increasingly, hopefully, we’ll be able to cross-promote those things. Nick, I think you have an additional suggestion there.

Nick:
Yeah, well, just an anecdote really. I was engaging with a community member who was very new to WordPress. They wanted to solve this problem—they wanted to build this plugin. But when you build a plugin, you need to know how to register a plugin—the first step—and then you need to know how to do the thing you want it to do. Those are two completely different things. If you don’t know how to build a plugin, you can’t get the plugin to do what you want it to do. So, being able to direct that user to the Introduction to WordPress Development, they get all the foundation so they know how to do all the basic stuff, and then they can jump to building what they want. Whereas if they’re trying to jump to all these different documentation articles, it becomes very confusing. This user was quite frustrated with that experience. Learn WordPress provides the solution for them to really get up to speed and then build their skills further.

Abha:
And of course, the more people that get involved and help build some of these intermediate and advanced areas for users and developers, the quicker we’ll get to these solutions too. Thank you, Nick. Laura, in terms of the refreshed site, I know we’ve touched on a couple of things that you like about it already. What else would you encourage people to go and look at and feel that this is now something that will really help them?

Laura:
Yeah, we touched on the search and the navigation, and the thumbnails. Each of the lessons has a little thumbnail picture, and we’ve coordinated with the design team to create the thumbnail creation Figma file. That makes it a little bit more cohesive throughout—everything is kind of the same. That was another great way for contributors around the world to contribute—they could create the thumbnails. That was a great thing as a beginner to get used to contributing. We still need help with that. We’re now going back to all of our older lessons and some of the lessons from other teams that we have that still need help with thumbnails. So, I really like that aspect of it.

Abha:
Again, we can put that link in because it’s really good. I remember doing that as part of a training day contributor event, where we created lots of thumbnails and helped each other—it was actually quite fun.

Laura:
Yes. Yeah, we had a thumbnail of fun.

Abha:
It was amazing. I had great fun on that. Contributing can be fun. If you subscribe to this channel regularly, or just hear me talk about WordPress, you’ll know that contributing can definitely be fun. On that note, I’m going to head back to Kathryn. For me, and for many people out there, the idea of a project keeping pace with a release is really hard because releases happen quite a few times a year, and there’s a lot to try and capture. How will this refreshed site help people get more connected to what’s in a release and learn about those things in a smoother way?

Kathryn:
One of the things to keep an eye out for is online workshops. We haven’t talked about them a lot, but they are the real-time events that happen regularly and cover a topic. There are usually at least one or two online workshops for each new release. For 6.6, there were actually two different people who ran a workshop to go over some of the new features, which was really cool because different people have different perspectives on what are the things to highlight and how to show them. That was really amazing. In terms of maintaining the content over time, as areas of WordPress get updated and change, that’s going to be a discussion that we are having in the community about an ongoing content maintenance plan. It’s not one of the glamorous areas of maintaining the site, but it is something that really has to happen because we want people who do a search for something to find an up-to-date video that looks like what they see in their dashboard and reflects the steps that are currently relevant. We don’t want people getting frustrated by looking at an outdated lesson or screenshots or anything like that, but it isn’t a simple problem to solve. We have opened a discussion in the community; there’s a post that talks about how we want to create a plan. Is it going to be a process of going through things on a quarterly basis, on a semi-annual basis? Are we going to tie it to releases? How do we go in and update? Are there going to be priority areas that should be updated first before others? So, that is a whole set of questions that we are going to work on with the community to establish some guidelines. We’re also going to look at what other sites do. How do other sites maintain older content, and if so, for how long? What is a reasonable and realistic way for us to go about this because we have limited resources in terms of who’s going to be doing this work? I guess the short answer is: to be discussed, and we’ll know more once we’ve had more discussions with the community about how we’re going to go about this.

Abha:
Thanks, Kathryn. Again, we can put a link to this so that people can still take part. I presume it’s not a closed discussion; it’s an open discussion, and we want to have as many views as possible. One of the things that I always get feedback on when I do presentations on Learn WordPress to meetups is that this content isn’t necessarily in my local language. So, with this refreshed website, is there still room for content that’s not just in English? I’m going to go to Nick first on that.

Nick:
Yeah, I think that one of the things the team is looking at is how we can handle translations on the site. There are courses and lessons currently in other languages. I think that kind of translation and making sites

available in many different languages is kind of a core thing that WordPress is thinking about. I think it’s Phase 4 of the Gutenberg roadmap—multilingual. I think that obviously, we’re going to try and find a solution before multilingual because that will take some time, as WordPress releases tend to take some time. But I think it is something that’s on the team’s roadmap. I’m forgetting the name of the plugin—I think it’s TranslatePress—that is being looked at right now by the developer team to see if we can implement that.

Abha:
Laura, if people want to get involved now with actually translating some of the original content that exists, where would they go to get started?

Laura:
That’s what I was talking about earlier—getting started, getting ahold of one of us to say, “Hey, I’m interested,” and we can start showing you the translation onboarding process. We’ve had a couple of glitches right now, so we’re kind of in a standstill, but we still want people to translate information, and we’ll definitely be able to walk you through how to add that within the ecosystem of learn.wordpress.org.

Abha:
Thanks, Laura. Watch out for one of our future shows this year, where we’re going to be looking at multilingual. We have guests coming up who have been working in this area. I’m going to go back to Nick. For people who think, “Okay, the site’s got a refresh, it’s got a little bit more categorization, a better understanding, but it doesn’t answer what I need to learn,” what should they do? How can they influence the next focus for Learn?

Nick:
Yeah, absolutely. I think it’s really important to stress that everything we do on WordPress.org, especially Learn, is driven by contributors and the feedback we get from the community. Laura, being one of the leads for the training team, can speak to this as well, but if you see something that’s missing, advocate for that. Share it with the training team, share it with folks because if you’re seeing something that’s missing, it’s likely that others are looking for that as well. There’s only so much time in contributor time to get things done, but the more people advocating for certain topics, the more likely it will be created. Or if you end up learning about that yourself, consider contributing it back. I remember when I started on the training team long, long ago, all the online workshops I did for Learn were on topics I didn’t know about before I did the learning. I would learn the topic and then present it to the community. That’s a great way of learning the topic, and we move forward. It’s a very collaborative, very positive environment on the training team. I really encourage folks to get involved. It’s how I started contributing to WordPress, and it’s led me to where I am today, so I can’t say enough good things about it.

Abha:
Laura, if people want to connect with the team reps like yourself in training, how do they do that?

Laura:
Yeah, usually the best way is to join the Slack training team. The Getting Started guide walks you through setting up a WordPress.org account and joining our Make WordPress Slack channel. You can see the different teams you can be involved with. People are involved with multiple teams too. It’s open to what you’re interested in. Our team currently has three team reps so that we can have coverage for a lot of different areas. We’re in multiple time zones, which is really beneficial so that we can focus in on and have presentations. We started doing coffee chats with our contributors. If they have questions for a more experienced contributor, they can ask those questions. We’re doing onboarding chats within our teams to meet with people face-to-face on Zoom so that they might feel a little more comfortable on camera too, and maybe we can get those people to do presentations. A lot of our contributors also have a connection with their community, with their local meetups. Learn.wordpress.org is a great resource to bring back to your local community. A couple of people have done presentations or are teaching a group of people using the WordPress user pathway, so they’re kind of testing for us, but they’re also using it for their community too. We’re excited to hear that feedback from people using the learning pathways within their communities.

Abha:
It is about that feedback. Nothing in WordPress moves forward without feedback. So, if you’re looking at the site, taking a course, or plunging into a module and taking some of Kathryn’s suggestions, trying out some of those courses—if you have feedback, there’s always a link at the end of each module that allows you to give feedback as well. Please do share it. Please remember, this site and its content are produced by contributors just like you—users of WordPress, people who love it. Be part of that. As we come toward our close today, I’ve got a few quick questions for the panel. Kathryn, I’m going to come to you first. Now you’re based in Canada—is it Montreal you’re in?

Kathryn:
Yes, Montreal, Quebec, Canada.

Abha:
A wonderful part of the world. Kathryn, we do a lot of talking about food on this program. I did warn you ahead of time to tell me about your favorite recipe and what it says about the culture and things that are around it. So what do you have for me today?

Kathryn:
Well, I’m a huge baker, so it was very hard to choose, and I don’t even know if I could pick one thing, but I’ll tell you one personal favorite and one culturally relevant favorite, if that’s okay. The first one I want to mention is Never-Fail Chocolate Cake. So, my mom was moving into a new apartment, and she uncovered this recipe book that was created when I was in kindergarten. I was about five years old. In this book that she uncovered, there was one page that was just full of chocolate, and it was really disgusting. The reason it was so disgusting was that it was the one recipe she would make over and over—and she was not a baker, she still isn’t—but it was this Never-Fail Chocolate Cake. I looked at it and thought, “Wow, I’m curious to know what a recipe this old is like and if it’s any good anymore.”

So, I made a few adjustments—I changed the shortening to butter, made a few tweaks—and it was actually delicious. It was a very easy recipe. It even inspired me to make a whole blog post about it, which doesn’t happen often. So, there’s a whole blog post about Never-Fail Chocolate Cake. Just very quickly, the other recipe is Butter Tart Squares. We have a thing in Canada, a dessert called Butter Tarts. Normally, they are little individual pastries with a pastry crust and then kind of like this gooey filling, similar to a pecan pie filling if you’ve had that. Sometimes there are nuts, sometimes there are raisins. I don’t ever have raisins because, to me, that’s just not a thing. But I discovered this recipe that’s a little easier than making individual butter tarts, and it’s Butter Tart Squares. It’s got layers of pastry crust, a layer of the goo, and a layer of pecans, and it’s just delicious—and it’s a very Canadian thing. So, those would be my two that I would share.

Abha:
I am so hungry now. I think I need the Never-Fail Chocolate Cake in my life. What I didn’t tell you, of course, is that whatever you suggested, you might end up making live on one of the shows that we’re working on—a series of shows. But I think after hearing the Never-Fail Chocolate Cake, that’s going to be really popular with our audience, who will vote on the best recipes they want to see done live. So, I’m going to go to Nick, who looks a bit worried.

Nick:
Yeah, I’m a bit worried. I don’t cook as much as I should, or what I cook is not something that is worth sharing on this show—it’s quite boring. But one thing I do want to share is that my wife is Italian, and one of the things we cook quite a bit—I always pronounce this wrong, or however you want to pronounce it—is gnocchi, which is like a potato noodle with fresh homemade pasta sauce. Gnocchi is a very traditional dish, and our family’s been passing down the recipe forever. It’s very simple to make but very good. So that’s our go-to home-cooked pasta-type meal.

Abha:
Well, I can tell you to ease your concern that you’ve got a little time to practice how to pronounce it, and we may just have that on the show. Of course, we will be talking all things Woo at the same time, as you would expect. But it is to build on our WP recipe, and we’ve got some great ideas that we’re going to be sharing as well. So let me have those recipes. Laura, what have you got for us?

Laura:
So my recipes come from—I married into an Italian-Lithuanian family, and we have a lot of really good stuff. Bacon buns are a Lithuanian thing from my father-in-law, and it’s a yeast dough with ham predominantly, and then a little bit of bacon. Some people like to put onions in it too. So we’ve always made trays of bacon buns for different holidays. I’m also a big baker, so my go-to is éclair cake, which is graham crackers and vanilla pudding. When you let it sit overnight, it tastes like an éclair. So that’s been a family thing on my side of the family. Growing up on the south side of Chicago, our churches would have recipe books—that’s how the church would raise money. This was a recipe book from my aunt, and everyone’s made it in our family.

Abha:
I love that idea. We’ve got some plans with how we’re going to support other contributors

with our recipe stuff too. So yes, I think all three of you passed that test. I now know that Bob will be sitting there in the background on the show thinking about chocolate, bacon, and potatoes. So thank you very much for joining us. Before we go, I’m just going to ask Nick to share, I think, one of the most important things about the Learn WordPress project. It uses so many different skills and disciplines to make it happen and create the end result—to create the learning, the reflection, the understanding, and the localization. What makes it special, and what skills and disciplines from the people listening to the show would you like to appeal to come and get involved?

Nick:
Yeah. Well, thanks for the question. I think you’re right; it is a very important one. So obviously, if you’re interested in creating educational material, the training team’s great for that. But if you’re a developer, a designer, or a copywriter, contributors from across the spectrum came together to make this possible. There’s actually an ongoing effort for WordPress.org as a whole to upgrade different areas of the site, with Learn WordPress being one of them. That includes people from the marketing team, marketing folks, people from Meta—the developers that maintain the website—we have designers, and then there’s me, who just floats across all sorts of different teams. It’s really a broad spectrum. So no matter what your skill set is, if you’re passionate about Learn, there’s a place for you, whether it’s creating educational content or even just helping with the architecture of the site. There’s an entire GitHub project board with features that we’d like to implement, which will require development, and that is something folks can help contribute to, as well as design work. So really, I just want to stress that no matter what your current skill set is, there is a place for you to contribute to both Learn WordPress and the broader WordPress community as a whole.

Abha:
And we hope to see you there. And of course, if you do get involved with any of the things we’ve highlighted in the WordPress Way, then let us know. We won’t necessarily share your story if you’d rather we didn’t, but it does help us feed into the other interviews we do, and we’d always love to hear from our audience as well. Do look out for our next shows. We’ve got multilingual, a big reflection on the releases of this year later in November as well, and we’re going to fly over to a couple of other places as well. If we haven’t featured your country or your area of WooCommerce, do get in touch. I’m Nonstop News UK on Twitter. You can get my details from the make.wordpress.org profiles as well. All that remains for me to say is thank you to my wonderful panel today and goodbye from me.