Hello, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of Your Website Engineer podcast. My name is Dustin Hartzler, and, today, we’re gonna dive in, and we’re gonna wrap up the month of June talking about where we can learn things about WordPress, and this week, we’re talking about where we can learn by watching videos and online tutorials.

So, we’ll get to that in just a few minutes. First off, I wanted to let you know of a few announcements. There has been an update to the WordPress iOS app, and there is a new Media Library. And so, this makes it much easier to pick images. It came to Android first, and now, it’s rolled out to iOs, but Version 7.8 includes a top-level Media Library selection for you to manage your site, making it even easier to share images, videos, and your other media on your phone or your tablet device.

The cool part about the Media Picker, too, is it also has built in a camera, so if you say Add Media, it will also pull up – one of the images can be your camera, and you can take a picture right then, and then automatically import it right into your WordPress site.

So, I really like that. The WordPress app is just top-notch. I’ve been using it blogging over at Dustin.blog for the last 100 or few days, and some days, it’s like, “I don’t know what I wanna post about,” and I’ll just go into my camera roll and pick one of the photos. I’m using it a little bit more like Facebook and Twitter, like instead of posting all that stuff there, where it could be gone someday, I’m gonna post it on my own website over there at Dustin.blog. So, if you’re interested in seeing behind-the-scenes of what goes on here, that’s where to find it.

Another piece of news in the WordPress space this week is just a little bit of highlighting of what’s to come in WordPress 4.9 and 5.0. And so, we’ve talked about 4.8 came out a couple weeks ago, and we got some new widgets, and we got some new small little tweaks here and there, and that’s kind of how WordPress has been over the last couple years. There’s not huge, huge things that have released with different point revisions, and we slowly keep getting better and better.

And so, WordPress 4.9 is going to be focused on managing plugins and themes. That’s gonna be the primary arching goal. And then, WordPress 5.0 is going to be focusing on that new Gutenberg plugin editor is what it’s called. It’s the Gutenberg Editor, I guess, is the way that they’re calling that. And there’s another article that I linked to. Both of these two articles came from WPTavern.com.

And the Gutenberg Editor, which I talked about a couple weeks ago as the plugin of the week, is a plugin that is a feature plugin that people are working on and then eventually will be rolled into core WordPress. And this, basically, makes it easier to create those full-page templates, I guess, if you will. If you think about a page that has maybe a section for some text, and then maybe a section for testimonials, and then maybe a gallery, and it’s kind of broken down page by page, that’s essentially what the Gutenberg Editor is.

And it is at Version, I think, 0.2 right now, and I’ve seen a lot of just people exploring and checking it out and seeing what it can do, and so, I definitely recommend checking it out. It’s something that’s going to be a new feature inside of WordPress in 5.0 in a couple releases. And so, if you want to participate in the conversation and see how it works, just get behind the scenes, you can check that out. There’s a link in this article from WP Tavern how you can go over and get it from the WordPress repository.

It’s pretty simple, if you search for “Gutenberg,” and it’s got more than 700 active installs. And so, people are starting to use that, and I’m starting to see reviews online that people are using is and whether they like it or not. It’s kind of mixed right now. It’s brand new. It’s not really been worked on very much, so this is a chance for you to get into the game and say, “Hey, I like this,” or, “I don’t like this,” or, “Is this the way that it’s supposed to work?” So, that is the Gutenberg plugin.

So, that wraps up the news for the week.

There’s more than 50,000 plugins in the WordPress repository, and you always might think, “Well, is there a plugin for that?” Of course, there’s a plugin for that. There’s 50,000 free plugins, plus all the premium ones. But, today, I want to talk about one that’s called When Last Login, and this is by YooHoo Plugins, and it’s a fairly new plugin. It’s only got 2,000 active installs, but it is a lightweight plugin that will allow you to see users according to their last login time. There’s no need to configure. You can activate it and go. There’s just a custom column in your Users list, and it gives the last login and a timestamp linked to that user.

So, there’s some cool things that you can do with this plugin. Like I said, you can see when a user has last logged in to your site, but you can also organize that user list ascending or descending based on the login timestamp. There is an administrator widget for the top users according to login stats, and it’s got integration with Paid Memberships Pro. They’ve got some premium add-ons as well, where you can see some Slack notifications and user statistics and Zapier integration.

So, this is a cool plugin. If you’re running a site with multiple people logging in, this would be a cool one to add. If you’re running some sort of membership site, or you’ve got a bunch of content and you want to know when people are logging in and doing their work, you can definitely check that out. It’s found in the WordPress repository, searching for “When Last Login.”

Okay, let’s, today, dive into a whole list of places that you can go online to see videos and online tutorials on how to use WordPress. And some of them are beginner, some of them are a little more advanced, but there’s tons of resources that are out there. I tried to pull in – let’s see how many I have here. 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12 of them? 13? I guess there’s 13 of them that we’ll talk about today. And that’s not all of them, of course, just like the blogs last week were not all of them. There’s tons and tons and tons of these out there. So, let’s go ahead and just dive right in. I’ll tell you a little bit about each one of them, and let’s just go ahead and dive right in.

The first one is WordPress.tv. This is one of the places where tons of video resources are all put together on this website. The website is completely free to use, and it has a lot of WordPress past talks. So, for example, if you’ve ever been to a WordCamp, you normally see a camera recording the sessions, and so, all of the sessions get recorded, and then they get sent over to a volunteer on WordPress.tv who does some editing. They compress them to make the files a little smaller, and then they upload a whole batch.

So, I was just at WordCamp Kent this past weekend. They recorded all three sessions that were going on at the same time, and so, at the end of the weekend, there was maybe 35 sessions that they then took all of that information, and they send it to WordPress.tv, and all of those talks will be there. So, that’s a great way, if you miss a talk, if you’re at a WordCamp, you can see things, and this gives you a wide variety of topics.

So, they’re got really basic beginner things. They’ve got some intermediate things. They’ve got business development tracks or marketing, and they have special videos that are just for coding. They’ve got different languages. They’ve got tons of stuff over on WordPress.tv. If you’ve never checked it out, I highly recommend that as your first stop when you start looking for online video tutorials.

The next one that I have on the list is WordPress 101’s videos on iThemes.com. So, iThemes is a place where they sell premium plugins, essentially. There’s the BackupBuddy they’re primarily known for, but they have a whole suite of plugins. But this has lots of videos that you can get started with. The 101 page has stuff like creating a WordPress post, and adding links, and formatting posts, and creating a page, and just hundreds of videos that are linked over there. Again, all of these will be linked in the Show Notes for Episode No. 343. So, that is WordPress 101 videos over on iThemes.com.

There is Videos.WPBeginner.com. This is one of the sites that I mentioned last week. WPBeginner.com’s got a bunch of tutorials, a blog post, and whatnot. This, you have to create a free account in order to start watching the videos there, but you can do that very simply, very easily. You just add your details there, and you can go ahead and sign up and start watching those videos for free.

Over on SiteGround is the next place, and they have some videos for creating WordPress sites. There’s lots of just easy things, like how to install WordPress, how to change a password, profile, header images. And they’ve just got a bunch of videos on plugins and partners and all kinds of things there. So, there’s a link in the Show Notes for that one. But especially if SiteGround is your host, definitely wanna check out those videos as well.

Moving right along here, the next one is a well-known one called WP101, and this is a website that’s been out there since 2008, and they’ve been producing WordPress tutorials ever since then, and they constantly keep them updated, so every time there’s a new UI change, any time there’s new features, any time any of these things happen, they go in and update the appropriate videos. And so, you can go and you can start watching videos there. They’ve got some WordPress courses. They’ve got some free videos. They’ve got some paid videos.

And one of the things that it says on their homepage is there’s no “ums” or “uhs.” It’s praised for the gold standard for WordPress tutorials. They script everything, and then they professionally produce everything. And there’s closed captioning. There’s captioning in English and subtitled in Spanish. And so, that makes it easy for everybody to consume, and watch the videos, and not really listen, and just read what’s going on on the text.

So, tons of great information there, so if you’re interested in that, you can start with WordPress fundamentals is a one-time purchase of $19.00. If you want all the current courses, it’s $39.00 one-time, lifetime-access purchase. And then, if you get every course that they ever create, it’s $79.00 one-time purchase. So, those are the pricing models, but they also do have some free videos that you can check out. And this is usually one of the first places that I send people to when they wanna learn a little bit about WordPress.

Kind of the partner with WP101, they also have a plugin called WP101 Plugin, and this is a plugin that allows your clients to watch WP101 tutorials right from their own dashboard. So, you can choose which videos to show and even add to your own videos. There’s a free 14-day trial to do this, and it’s very inexpensive, as well, to do this. It looks like if you wanna do just one site, it’s $30.00 per year, or if you wanted to do a freelance or monthly is $19.00 a year. And then, they’re all white-label videos, and you can add them right to your client’s dashboard.

Back in the day, when I was building clients’ websites, I thought this would be a perfect idea, like, “Hey, why don’t I do this? Why don’t I create these videos, and then just add them, and kind of make it a plugin, and then people could buy it and whatnot?” And here, Shawn over at WP101 has done that.

The next set of videos comes from MyThemeShop.com, and this is a WordPress 101 series as well, and they are free videos, and there are about 35 of them over there, a little over 30. It’s just another free resource. The videos are 100 percent free, and they’ll never ask for a penny. It’s just their way of saying thank you to the WordPress community. The videos look really great, the overall design looks really well, and they’re just really well produced. So, this is a place that you can get started as well. It might be another resource that I start sharing with people, MyThemeShop.com, and then look for their WordPress 101 video series.

Another player in the game that you probably hear a lot of sponsorships for on podcasts and whatnot is Lynda.com, and they have a whole section that I’ve linked up here in the Show Notes for WordPress-specific videos, and it looks like, right now, there is 86 different WordPress courses. So, they’ve got WordPress custom post types and taxonomies. They’ve got WordPress ecommerce WooCommerce plugins. They’ve got information about the rest of the API. You can learn Genesis for WordPress. You can create an intranet with websites or with WordPress. You can – let’s see – plug in analytics, SEO. Lots and lots and lots of video tutorials over there.

So, like I said, there’s 86 different courses, over 2,000 video tutorials. It does cost, I believe, $25.00 per month for Lynda.com, but you can start a free 30-day trial by just heading over there. There’s a big yellow button right there at the top of that page.

Another place where you can train your clients and even yourself, if you are interested, is over at VideoUserManuals.com. It’s $1.00 for the first month, and essentially what this is is it’s very much like the WP101 Plugin, but this allows white-label branding videos inside the WordPress dashboard. And so, you can add these videos, and you can let your clients know, “Here’s how you watch this video,” and all of the information is just built right into the dashboard. So, that’s really nice. It looks like the pricing on that is $70.00 for a single site and $240.00 per year for the developer license for unlimited client websites. So, that’s over at VideoUserManuals.com. I wouldn’t say that this would be the best place just to go to learn WordPress, but it’s another resource that has very great WordPress tutorials.

Up next is Udemy. Udemy, surprisingly, has tons of WordPress courses. Just looking here, there’s five pages’ worth of videos, so there’s maybe 50 or 60 different WordPress videos that are out there that will focus either on “Theme Development with Bootstrap,” or “Master WordPress Quickly,” “The Complete WordPress Business Course,” and these look like, right now, they’re all $10.00. It looks like they’re having a sale right now on Udemy through the end of the month that all courses are $10.00. And so, if this is something that’s interesting you, some of these video series are 12 hours. Some of them are 20 hours. Here’s one that’s only four and a half hours on how to build an amazing site from scratch. So, all kinds of different levels and all kinds of different instructors have their courses over on Udemy.com.

Another place that I love learning about WordPress, I love learning about code, is TeamTreehouse.com. The videos over on Treehouse are probably ones that are gonna be more geared for more savvy WordPress users or somebody that wants to learn something specific about WordPress, whether you want to learn more about PHP, and how to use PHP and build your own child theme, and things like that. So, it’s kind of geared that way, but you can learn tons of different stuff on there. There’s all about the command line. There’s about Git and how to use version control. There is Photoshop or Adobe Illustrator, or how to use Ruby on Rails or JavaScript. They have hundreds of hours of video courses over there.

This has a seven-day free trial, so if you’re interested, you can go check that out, but it is $25.00 per month to be in there. I’m currently going through a JavaScript course that really doesn’t have much to do with WordPress, but it is just learning the basics of JavaScript and how it works and all of those things. I say I’m going through it. I started months ago, and then had a baby, and now haven’t had a chance to do anything with that for a while. So, that is TeamTreehouse.com.

And then, the last one that has tons of WordPress tutorials is over on Tuts+, it’s called. It’s a division of the Envato network, and they have a link here for the top-50 WordPress tutorials. And so, they’re just short little tutorials there. There’s a link in the Show Notes for this. And some of the things that they can talk about is how to become a WordPress developer, how to use multisite, and how to install it with a single database, and how to unravel the secrets of the comments.PHP file. And then, there’s theme tutorials, and how do you write CSS, and rounded-corner menu tabs, and how to write your first WordPress plugin, and how to write a simple WordPress plugin, and miscellaneous things. So, there’s tons of videos and tons of just tutorials there that you can learn from over at Code.TutsPlus.com. And again, the link is in the Show Notes for Episode No. 343.

And lastly, I wanna talk about ConquerYourWebsite.com. This is a website that I used to have a premium product a few years back, before I started with Automatic, and in the third quarter of 2017, I will be revamping this to be a video tutorial site. It pains me so much when people ask me, “Well, how do I learn about WordPress? And what can I do about this?” and I have to send people to other resources instead of ones that are my own. And I love creating these videos. I love creating this content.

And so, I’m gonna revitalize and revamp ConquerYourWebsite.com. My ultimate goal is to have a few different levels of training over there. It’ll initially have a beginner or kind of like a “Here’s how to use WordPress” kind of an overview thing, a video series that just has some short videos talking about, “Here’s the basics,” and kind of an overview of WordPress, and how to set up some plugins, and things along those lines.

I want to do a course that’s about HTML and CSS because you can really expand how your website works by using a little bit of CSS and knowing just a little bit of HTML. So, that’s another feature there.

And then, I plan to repurpose – I used to have a course called “The Advanced WordPress Developer Course,” and again, this was before my time at Automatic, and I want to kind of talk through how to build a theme, and how to build a child theme on top of a theme, and how to write a plugin, and how do you properly enqueue scripts into the functions.PHP file, or what do you do with a Must Use plugin, things like that, top-level stuff.

And so, I’m gonna be focusing the third quarter, so that is going to be – let’s see – July, August, and September on doing this, and I have no idea how I’m gonna work through all of this with a couple trips involved. I have three different trips in that quarter, and I’m gonna be away for a while, but I’m definitely gonna work my hardest to get all the things recorded so I can be editing them while on the go.

So, if you’re interested in knowing when that comes out, head on over to ConquerYourWebsite.com, and there’s just a signup form there real quick, and you can put your name and email address there, and I will just send you information as it’s being built, as the course is being built.

So, that’s what I wanted to share with you today, tons of different resources. There’s literally thousands of websites out there that have videos. Even if you search YouTube, there’s tons and tons and tons. These are the top ones that I could find and the ones that I like to recommend to people. And so, next week, we’re gonna talk [inaudible] [00:17:50]. We’re gonna start a new month. We’re gonna start a new series. I believe we’re gonna talk about advanced things to do with WordPress. I won’t make it too super-technical throughout the show, but just talking about some more advanced things that maybe we haven’t talked about in a while. We haven’t really done full WordPress stuff in quite a while – in a few months – and so, I want to get back into that.

And that’s all I got for you this week. Take care, and we’ll talk again soon. Bye-bye.