Zac Gordon to Kickstart JavaScript Master Course for WordPress

photo credit: ParisJS, May 2012 – (license)

Last week the WordPress community took to Twitter and the Treehouse forums to express disappointment at the company’s decision to fire educator Zac Gordon. According to Gordon, the company will be giving his salary to a .NET developer and will no longer create new WordPress courses, nor do they plan to update the existing courses.

I contacted Ryan Carson, CEO of Treehouse, to ask about the reasoning behind the decision to reallocate resources towards other technologies and whether the company would be updating its WordPress courses. Carson declined to answer any specific questions but released the following statement:

Zac has made valuable contributions to Treehouse, and we continue to wish him nothing but the best. Treehouse will continue to offer our quality WordPress content to students for the foreseeable future.

The company may decide to revive its WordPress education in the future with new courses and updates but for the time being it looks like they will sell the existing courses until they are outdated.

In the meantime, Zac Gordon is moving on to continue teaching WordPress via his site WPDevCasts. After attending the State of the Word address at WordCamp US, Gordon decided to seize the day by offering a JavaScript for WordPress Master Course.

“As a teacher, when I heard Matt’s homework assignment, I thought, what can I do to help us all learn JavaScript?” Gordon said. “Here I was, a WordPress teacher, fresh out of work and wondering what to do next. His words really inspired me to try to do something extra special to try to give something valuable back to the community.”

Gordon is working on producing the course which he said will include more than 20 individual courses and take roughy 40 hours to complete. It will cover topics such as JavaScript in Core, the REST API, major JS frameworks used with WordPress (Backbone, Angular, React), workflow tools, and walk throughs of real world examples.

“My hope is that this will give everyone who goes through it a solid, high level understanding of everything they need to really get rolling as WordPress JavaScript developers,” Gordon said.

Gordon has put together a group of community experts to oversee the curriculum development, including WP REST API project lead Rachel Baker, several JS-knowledgeable core contributors, and developers with real world experience using the new API. During the course of working with them, Gordon plans to open source the efforts of the advisors in a “JavaScript for WordPress Self Study Guide.”

The JavaScript for WordPress Master Course will launch in early 2016. Gordon will also be launching a Kickstarter campaign on January 7th to help support the project.