Marketing WordPress to Developers – January 18 2017 Meeting Notes

The Marketing WordPress to Developers team met for the first time since WordCamp US . We discussed new ideas of ways to better explain the advantages of the WordPress platform for the new developers as well as how can we improve the documentation of the WordPress features in form of case studies and white paper so it can be easily understandable to quick learners.

If you’re interested in contributing, please have a read through our chat and the items listed below and leave a comment with which you’d like to help build! You can read the whole meeting in Slack here or the recap below.

Recap of Goals/Scope: Marketing WordPress to developers: this subgroup focuses on providing development– related information, technical use cases and examples, technical best practices, and in general help developers understand how, when, and why to use WordPress when developing websites. Providing information for theme and plug-in developers would also fall in this category. (Read about the other marketing subgroups in The Four Horsemen of WordPress.org Marketing)

Projects and priorities suggested

The following topics were shared in the chat. This is not an approved list of projects, just suggestions or places to start! Other suggestions are welcome (please bring them to the next monthly chat).

If a particular suggestion strikes your interest and you have time to work on it, please raise your hand in the comments with a mention about which one so those interested can start coordinating in Slack (in #marketing).

1. Continue to conduct developer interviews and compile info from WCUS meeting (notes linked here)
2. Why WordPress for new developers to WordPress, the strengths on WordPress, reasons to use it, how to build custom sites with it. To remove the preconceived ideas that developers might have about WordPress.
3. How to involve new developers more with WordPress? What information or guides can we provide aside from the Theme & Plugin handbooks? Where should a developer from 0 start?
   1. Getting new developers to use WordPress for site builds.
4. What kind of interviews do we need to take to promote WordPress to new developers? Interviews can be in form of blog or video?
   1. From developer to developer – detail about the functions & features that lead them to choose WP as their CMS.
   2. Here’s how I use WP.
   3. Migrations – Most new developers are using ready-made systems like Wix, Squarespace, Weebly or a self-hosted CMS. We can find a developer who has migrated from those platform and using WP. We can take their interview and perception of migrating from self hosted to WordPress.
   4. Gathering a list of developers to interview is an idea; a list of results/outcomes is also another idea – what kinds of emotions/results/reasoning do we want the interviews to speak to?
      1. Results: rapid development / time to market.
      2. Tons of existing technology to leverage. Devs don’t have to create everything from scratch. And the technology has been beta tested by a large community.
5. Case Studies
   1. A template for creating a case study for open sourced technologies.
   2. Case studies showing off technology like WP_API for the integration with different backends and integrations with development setups (js, php api clients).
   3. WordPress still has a reputation as a blog platform to some that are not in the know. Case studies help overcome that.
   4. Educating developers about the option to use WordPress in their software as a backend.