First of all Sorry, I missed June deadline. So much going on in life with Covid-19 and the very start of my own company.
Now down to the updates:
Internationalisation:
Not much movement here, all the people involved had to deal with Covid-19 and had less time to dedicate. We will take things from where we left after reassessing the situation. I think we can have a meeting within next 10 days or so.
Documentation:
At the very start of the project general opinion was that CP, being a fork of WP 4.9.x, did not need a separate documentation/support structure like the one we can see at WP.com or WP.org.
This before being included in major one-click installers and starting to build themes/plugins directory.
Some of us decided to publish articles aimed at enticing people by supplying tutorials.
I feel that the change happening in WP will make all WP docs and resources pre 4.9.x outdated, this resulting in the authors deprecating it (it’s a SEO tactic called content repurposing, the content will be manipulated over time to accompany WP evolution… and the old content is gonna get lost in the process and BTW WP.com started this process already).
Picture this: in a year a search for ClassicPress is going to offer the main official site, petition and forums… and maybe some plugins/themes and the directory.
People like my daughter who doesn’t know WP will search for extensive guides on how to use it (from an user and/or dev perspective) and will find very few resources aimed at WP 4.9.x if any.
This is linked with Marketing team efforts to address a target. We can totally use social media to produce original posts, to drive curiosity on CP and interacting… what comes next in the funnel is that people finding CP on twitter and the like, go to Google to see what is all about… and there they find very little, There are very few sites dedicated only to CP, supplying a stream of content. I mean INDEPENDENT bloggers. Not the official channels. When I am curious about something first thing I do is looking up what common people have to say about it.
In a nutshell: engagement needs some substance to support it… or people will turn away.
This situation is partly because we have a very limited number of people, and our time is spread very thin. People do their best to publish about CP but the volume of it is not able to get the buzz going.
So I rolled up my sleeves, and started a section of my site (still in the works) to offer CP paid support (with ticketing system) to my paying customers, and I decided to include a free Knowledge Base section that is in the works. I will release the Knowledge Base under GPL 2 so that CP can use it if appropriate.
For now I am putting together a series of posts aimed at users or DIYers, people who manage and have their hands on the site. I am not that tech savvy to generate articles on my own that deal with the dev side of things, but eventually i will find a way to include these also.
Most of the work for the knowledge base is done offline for now, I will share when ready.
This section of my site in reality has the sole purpose to do SEO with it in order to generate that buzz around CP that we need to increase our numbers. I could write simple updates on the project but I thought these wouldn’t be enough. We need a resource that people can find and visit many times a day. Something static, that they know is there. They will also find the updates on my blog section, but… how many times are they going to visit the blog section anyway? maybe only when I publish an update…
Marketing:
Not my area, but since I am writing here I will include my idea. We are trying to define a target to differentiate from WP, without noticing that WP itself is differentiating from its original target, leaving part of its user base aside to nitpick the worthy ones.
So, we can fork their target too… we are their target done better, with more focus on a modern usage of the web (aimed at business owners and people who do business, as opposed to bloggers/writers/news & media sites/publishers that are the current targets WP is aiming for with the block editor). One strength we have is that we will not abandon our target introducing breaking changes, we will take on the business part of the target that WP has dropped along the way and promising them stability is a great move, since they already feel betrayed.
Also I agree that the directory is a great step that differentiates us.
This is all for now. Tomorrow I will set up a doodle to decide a date for the i18n July meeting.