We have the opportunity to submit a talk to the 2020 PressEdConf Conference coming up on March 26th. The deadline for submissions is March 19th. (I put March 17 in the header so we’ll have time to actually make the submission in time.)
This has been discussed in Slack as a good way to get in front of educators and make them aware that ClassicPress exists. Under consideration is a talk comparing the differences between WP and CP. A discussion of ethics, accessibility, practicality (backwards compatibility) and performance would all be good points to make, here – plus anything else we decide is relevant.
We need to come up with a series of 10-15 tweets (280 characters max) for our talk; prepared beforehand and ready to tweet at our assigned time.
What should we talk about, and how can we condense this into the appropriate format?
This Top Tips link has some good advice; it’s worth the read for learning/inspiration.
I’ve looked through some of this and dug around on Twitter. It’s not clear how to find or follow a conference. I checked the hashtag, but, it seems like a mashup of random Tweets. It would be helpful to be able to click through a few past successful conferences – to see exactly what it is, what it entails, what kind of time commitment might be involved.
Regarding scheduling, the posts can be prewritten and scheduled in TweetDeck.
The hashtag for 2018 is #pressedconf18, if you’re curious about looking at some from another year. It looks like this is their third year of doing this.
Reading the “Top Tips” linked above might give a little more insight on what it is/entails/time commitment. I’ve been using a scheduling tool that was set up for our social media posts and had planned to use that, but TweetDeck may be even easier, so thanks for that insight – I’ll take a look.
I looked those over.,but, am not feeling overly inspired.
One thing that has constantly stuck in my craw (whatever a craw is,) is that a lot of people (even in our own community) don’t understand the real reason WordPress was forked. Or, maybe it’s me who didn’t understand.
I still see people saying it was forked “because Gutenberg” when, in actuality, that was merely the straw that broke the camel’s back, as they say. It was a long string of things: customizer, capital_p_dangit, Gutenberg, adversarial staffers, and more…
With Gutenberg, there was unprecedented community backlash (like never before seen in the OS world, ever,) and because it was predominantly minimized, dismissed, or ignored, – and the fact that WordPress didn’t care about the millions of dollars it would cost the community to keep up, repair damage, retrain clients, etc – It laid bare the fact that WordPress is community-supported, but, not community-based or with community interests at heart.
With these revelations, people just finally said “no more” and ClassicPress was born.
I agree with you that a lot of people have a misunderstanding, and it’s worth a separate discussion, for sure. From the beginning, our focus has been to get as much distance from Gutenberg as possible as soon as possible, or we’ll become the anti-Gutenberg and not much else. That’s why so much of our message does not include a lot of anti-blocks sentiment.
That said, I’m not sure that this opportunity needs to be a place we spend a lot of time on the “why we forked” question. I think it’s more about speaking to the relevance of ClassicPress to the educational community. If we can make a compelling argument about why ClassicPress is a viable preferred alternative, we may gain traction with educators… and that could go a very long way.
At the very least, we generate a tweet thread that anyone can reference to learn more about ClassicPress. I’m not really seeing a downside to this, other than the time spent to craft the message, but welcome further feedback.
Blockquote PressED is a conference (#pressedconf19) looking into how WordPress is used in teaching, pedagogy and research. The conference happens solely on twitter.
I’m not sure how much (if any) this is going to help, but here goes.
It’s the “teaching, pedagogy and research” aspect that I’m struggling with. How do we say that ClassicPress is a better alternative to WordPress in those specific fields?
I’ve only got one very tenuous thought…
Many school websites, in the UK at least, are built on WordPress and in some cases, pupils help to design and update content as a learning experience. This means learning a bit of HTML and CSS.
But this learning process will change if schools stay with WordPress, as it’s likely that instead of learning HTML, pupils will be taught how to drag and drop or click and click.
With the advent of things like the Raspberry Pi, schools are also being encouraged to teach pupils how to code and this seems at odds with the direction WordPress is taking.
I like your thoughts here, @1stepforward, and I don’t think it’s tenuous at all. I was just having a conversation with my lead dev today about how the “dumbing down” of technology has resulted in an entire generation of coders who must rely on helper technologies to get a job done and they don’t have a clue of how things actually work. These latest steps by WordPress continue that dumbing down process.
I think that @anon71687268’s comments highlight many of the more compelling reasons why ClassicPress began. They are a good basis for comparison/contrast. But I would encourage all of us to balance any comparisons with at least an equal amount of focus on what we’re doing right, rather than focus too much on what WP is getting “wrong”.
Here’s what we’re doing right. Here’s why it’s relevant to you, the user. Here’s why we’re the preferred alternative to WordPress.
One other thing I’ve thought of, which may or may not be relevant, is that through ClassicPress, I have learned an awful lot. Even though I’ve worked in IT for 30+ years, there’s always something new and working in Open Source is a difference experience to working in a corporate IT environment. I would not have had this opportunity with WordPress and probably wouldn’t have wanted it either. But if you find the right OS project with the right community, you can learn a lot very quickly. And it can be very rewarding.
And lastly, Learning Management Systems (LMS) such as LearnDash and LearnPress. I haven’t had chance to give this any thought yet but obviously CP is ideally suited to these systems, but is it any better than WordPress? Is there anything we can squeeze out of it?
I don’t mind your using the ideas…just, please rewrite them in your own words as the verbatim text is already part of an unpublished article I’ve written.
My idea is to write it as your citation, with a link to the codepotent.com page. If this is in your article, I can link straight to this article, because my article will not be published in the next 2-3 months, yours will be first.
I’m starting to think that our presentation could work very well positioned as a message specifically from the ClassicPress community, to the educational community and the world at large. These are your voices, and your experiences. These stories are authentic and real and more powerful than well-curated bullet points on a powerpoint slide. What else? What other voices can we add?
Actually this may be a good point to mention. Anyone involved in teaching anything about WordPress would need to have a set of prepared resources - handouts, study examples, slideshow presentations. etc. It must be a pain to have to constantly revise and rework these as WordPress keeps changing. With ClassicPress you will have a much more stable basis for teaching.
