Hi Brian,

As a member of the WPMU DEV blog writing team, I want to thank you for stopping by our blog and including it as part of the research foryour excellent article.

Prior to joining the WPMU DEV team, I spent over 14 years creating hundreds of detailed step-by-step tutorials for non-technical end users, so I am well aware of the challenges of training WordPress end users.

These challenges include:

Most WordPress training/educational content found online is aimed at a tech-savvy audience. It is written by tech-minded people and assumes that end users care to learn about things like REST API, code block functionality, php, etc., (which many don't).
WordPress is continuously being worked on and improved by a global community of tens of thousands of users. While this is fantastic for the platform, it means that WordPress is also continually and forever changing. This makes updating written documentation, tutorials (especially screenshots), videos, ebooks, online courses, etc, extremely challenging indeed and requires an enormous amount of strategy, resources, and collaboration to maintain.
Much of the functionality, flexibility, and awesomeness of WordPress is delivered via 3rd-party developers (e.g. plugins, themes, even WordPress management platforms like WPMU DEV), so this adds another level of complexity when it comes to providing WordPress training, especially the lack of control over the subject matter.

For example, WPMU DEV provides many articles on the blog that mention different plugins you can use to address all kinds of desired functionalities (e.g. WordPress plugins for form-building, security, SEO, optimization, etc.). Anyone who blogs about WordPress would be well aware that many of the plugins listed in their articles, tutorials, and listicles can quickly become outdated, obsolete, redesigned, etc. without any prior notice, so maintaining training content updated about 3rd-party software presents yet another formidable challenge.

I was particularly interested in the point you raised about "learning pathways" to allow "folks who come to Learn WordPress to find the specific content they need."

Personally, I have always felt that for WordPress to remain sustainable in the future, it must embrace the importance of training and empowering non-technical WordPress users. This is the target audience that most WordPress developers are ultimately building websites, plugins, themes, and solutions for.

If we can't empower a small business owner or a member of their staff to learn how to use their WordPress site effectively to grow their business online and make them fall in love with WordPress so they become lifetime loyal users of the platform, then WordPress will be like a three-legged stool (i.e. WordPress + Developers + End Users) with one very wobbly leg. If one leg falls off on a three-legged stool, everyone sitting on it will fall on their asses.

Thanks again for a great article and I wish you great success addressing the challenges of training and empowering all WordPress users ... especially non-technical end-users (who may not even know or care that their whole online business presence runs on WordPress).