Update: Questions and Answers, a Social Media Amplification Pack, and a Presentation which can be adapted by Meetups are also available on the Marketing Team’s GitHub. We are moving our final drafts to GitHub to help developers support these materials and provide a short term ‘home’ for Meetups to access and test the style and usage of items produced for their needs.
Support for the communications and wider marketing of a release
In the Global Marketing Team, we are currently working with other teams on a task to support and promote the upcoming WordPress 5.5 Release. We have been bringing together questions from feedback appearing in a variety of sources, including:
- support
- interaction with Meetups on what they need
- developers within the marketing team
- and typical questions appearing in search and community channels
We also know from our previous work and discussions in the wider community, that more user-focused information would be valuable and help further improve the experience post-release. It would enable users and Meetups to more easily share the benefits of new features and improvements.
We are using this current work to better understand where we can help users find out more about the benefits and new features of a release. This builds on the feedback and need for user-focused information, which we have shared with members of the release teams in the last two cycles.
What are we seeking to do
Through ongoing discussion cross-teams and in the weekly dev-chat, we are collaborating with others and members of the release squad on a pilot of a question and answers (FAQs). We are also exploring how to improve our social media pack to better help Meetups.
We are monitoring dev-chat and dev-notes, field notes, trac tickets, and more, and pulling together the information which could be useful for end users. We are noting what this requires and potential solutions to difficulties experienced previously when creating marketing materials during a release cycle.
We are also identifying posts and other content on WordPress.org which we could signpost and make it easier and a better user experience to find based on topic/ typical search questions, for example, dev-notes, documentation, training information, relevant support pages and more. We are focusing on the forthcoming 5.5 release for this pilot, which builds on previous collaboration between the Community, Core, Marketing and Training Teams.
What topics in the release will you be drafting Q&As and social media posts?
We will be exploring information available on the following areas which are expected for the WordPress 5.5 release.
- Lazy loading
- Auto-update for plugins and themes
- jQuery
- Image editor
- XML sitemaps
- Gutenberg update
- Block directory repository
If you want to help with these topics or want to contribute, join the #marketing channel or reach out directly to the following people in the Make WordPress Slack: @nullbyte, @vimes1984, @webcommsat
Please be aware that there has already been significant work into the documents in this pilot, and we might not be able to include your ideas in the first version of the questions and answers. But we will capture all the feedback made to help inform how we can support and promote releases and users going forward.
How will users find the information?
This is something we hope can be evaluated and tested through the work we are doing.
We have been liaising with the Documentation Team and Help Hub, and the Training Team and plans for a learning area in the future, and trying to better understand users’ communications needs from the questions relating to a release which go to support. Through this work on Questions and Answers, we believe we can also support these areas and the Core Team, and link in with what they already produce.
We have broken down users into two wide categories at this stage: users (assume non-developer background) and developers (assume new and experienced devs).
The final documents, which are orientated to developers, will be handed to the documentation team to publish them on the developer hub.
We are also working on an end-user centred Questions & Answers, incorporating typical questions as users start to use the latest release and its features. This content would go into the HelpHub to make it easier for users to find. In addition, it would assist the work Training Team is doing on lesson plans and more.
Thanks to everyone involved in the discussions, pilot, and who has submitted feedback and ideas for communicating releases to end users during recent releases.