The WordPress training team helps people learn to use, extend, and contribute to WordPress through synchronous and asynchronous learning as well as downloadable lesson plans for instructors to use in live environments, via learn.wordpress.org.
If you enjoy helping people learn how to use and build stuff for WordPress, immediately stop what you’re doing and join our team!
Regardless of your skillset, you can help! We need people to write, copyedit, test, audit, connect, and review our lesson plans. Find out how to get started.
There are many ways to contribute to Learn WordPress. Folks can join via contributing lesson plans to the Training team, organizing workshop-based discussion groups through local meetups, or submitting their own video workshop or course idea.
Some of these efforts happen outside the Learn WordPress website itself – like organizing a discussion group or using a lesson plan with a local meetup. For the most part, Learn WordPress contributors share a common home in learn.wordpress.org
Adding a big asterisk that this is by far from a definitive list of ways to contribute, but just some common pathways!
The current set-up
Currently, when someone contributes to Learn WordPress, they’re added to the Learn WordPress site using one of the standard user roles:
Administrator
Editor
Author
Author is primarily used for workshop contributors (i.e., folks who’ve recorded a workshop) and new Training team contributors helping with a specific lesson plan. Administrators are reserved for Training team representatives and Community deputies who need to add new users to the site. Folks organizing contributors days have also been given temporary Administrator access to help with onboarding new contributors.
For everyone else – and for most folks with access to Learn WordPress – Editor permissions are the most common. This is particularly important for Training team contributors, where folks need access to multiple lesson plans to draft, review, and copy edit content
The Learn WordPress Dashboard is robust. There are many options available on the backend for setting up lesson plans, workshops, quizzes, courses, and so on. Many similarly-named things (Lessons and Lesson Plans being one!) can make starting more challenging. Likewise, the Editor role provides a lot of control over the site from the get-go, which can be problematic from a security perspective in the long term.
Proposed new user roles
With all that in mind, I would like to propose two new custom user roles to better fit Learn’s functionality and structure.
Workshop Reviewers:When reviewing Meetup and WordCamp applications, Community Deputies have a custom meta box to share vetting notes. Sometimes this information is confidential, especially when a proposed application/applicant may not meet the program guidelines. The current workflow for evaluating workshop submissions is very similar to this process, and the Learn site would benefit from a role for workshop reviewers to have access to a confidential meta box for communicating review notes with one another.
Lesson Plan Editors: By default, lesson plans are developed with a series of checks and reviews to help ensure instructional design quality. This means that Training team contributors, including new contributors, need to access and edit multiple lesson plans. This includes folks like Subject Matter Experts, Copy Editors, and Testers. For folks volunteering to draft or review lesson plans, access to the other post types on Learn WordPress is not relevant or needed, but edit access to all lesson plans is.
Feedback needed
In the end, the proposed user roles would look like:
User role
Permissions
Author
Edit access to specific Workshops Edit access to specific Lesson Plans
Lesson Plan Editors
Edit access to all Lesson Plans
Editors
Edit access to all Lesson Plans Edit access to all Workshops Edit access to course functionality
Workshop Reviewers
Edit access to all content types, plus Deputy-level access to meta field for application vetting Ability to add new users to the site
Administrators
Full site access and permissions
It would be really helpful to get feedback on the following specifically:
How does this make contributing easier?
How does it make contributing more difficult?
Is there a simpler way to achieve the same goals?
Do we need to consider where learners/people using the Learn site might fit into these roles?
An update 🙂 Since it seems like we have relative agreement on this idea, I’ve moved the proposal over to the Learn WordPress Github in #220: Custom user roles for Learn WordPress.
I do not! With that question, I was mostly trying to see if we needed to consider any changes for custom user roles as it relates to learners on the site. In hindsight, and thanks to your question, I’m realizing that I was likely just overcomplicating things as I was thinking out loud 😀
An update 🙂 Since it seems like we have relative agreement on this idea, I’ve moved the proposal over to the Learn WordPress Github in #220: Custom user roles for Learn WordPress.
An update 🙂 Since it seems like we have relative agreement on this idea, I’ve moved the proposal over to the Learn WordPress Github in #220: Custom user roles for Learn WordPress.
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Thanks for helping to organize all this! I agree that we do need more specific user role capabilities for a lot of the audit needs as well: http://wayback.fauppsala.se:80/wayback/20210808152014/https://make.wordpress.org/training/2021/05/28/proposal-an-audit-tool-for-learn/
I agree we need more customized roles for Learn!
The table makes it pretty clear, looks good to me 👍
I can’t think of a way that these roles would have a bearing on site visitors. Do you have something specific in mind here?
Awesome, thank you Corey!
I do not! With that question, I was mostly trying to see if we needed to consider any changes for custom user roles as it relates to learners on the site. In hindsight, and thanks to your question, I’m realizing that I was likely just overcomplicating things as I was thinking out loud 😀
An update 🙂 Since it seems like we have relative agreement on this idea, I’ve moved the proposal over to the Learn WordPress Github in #220: Custom user roles for Learn WordPress.