Treehouse will be discontinuing its WordPress education courses. According to Zac Gordon, one of the site’s former educators, no new WordPress, BuddyPress, or WooCommerce courses will be created and existing content will not be updated in the future.
“The online learning company where I have been teaching WordPress for the last 3+ years told me that they were going to stop teaching WordPress, give my salary to a .NET teacher, and fire me,” Gordon said.
In a post announcing his departure, Gordon said that during his employment at Treehouse he was unable to convince the company of the value of investing in WordPress.
“While working at Treehouse I attended between 8-12 WordCamps per year and spoke about a range of the subjects I taught at Treehouse,” he said. “Not everyone knows this, but Treehouse didn’t pay for 95% of these trips. In fact, I regularly fought with Treehouse to see the value of sponsoring WordCamps, sending me to them to speak, and even that giving back to the community is an important thing we should do.”
Gordon’s understanding is that Treehouse will now be focusing its resources on technologies like Java, .NET, and JavaScript.
Despite the struggle to find a new way to support himself, Gordon is determined to continue teaching WordPress. Check out WP Tavern’s exclusive interview with him at WordCamp US where he elaborates on Treehouse’s decision.
Is this because there’s a greater quantity of developers in the Java / .NET enterprise space? Or is it because there’s more money in the enterprise space?
Let me guess…
WordPress may run 25% of the web. But which 25%?
I guess it’s just a business decision and a symptom of us all being too cheap in the WordPress world ;-)