For quite a while, Team Treehouse has been a popular website for learning new web design and development skills, such as PHP, .NET, JavaScript, WordPress, and so on.
Recently, Treehouse has decided to drop its WordPress courses. According to Zac Gordon, one of Treehouse’s (now former) WordPress educators, the website has discontinued all courses related to WordPress, BuddyPress and WooCommerce, and will not be adding new courses, nor will the existing courses be updated.
Gordon posted a rather emotional blog post discussing this matter, and went on to add that he tried hard to convince Treehouse to invest in WordPress, but the company failed to see any merit in it. Plus, he also shared that Treehouse will probably be focusing more on technologies such as .NET, JavaScript and the likes, rather than WordPress. To quote Gordon:
While working at Treehouse I attended between 8-12 WordCamps per year and spoke about a range of the subjects I taught at Treehouse. 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.
It might just be that WordPress, in itself, is not as difficult a skill to acquire as compared to, say, .NET, and as a result, Treehouse might not have seen much benefit in offering WordPress courses. Plus, there are several other WordPress-specific courses out there, and Treehouse would probably find itself better off focusing on topics that have less competition for them.
Either way, the news now is that Treehouse have discontinued their WordPress and related topics’ courses. What are your thoughts on this? Share your views in the comments below!
I was looking into subscribing to Treehouse for the purpose of using the WordPress courses because Treehouse is a leading, high quality online learning company. I have no need to use Treehouse now. Yes there are plenty of WordPress resources available, but how many are reliable and trustworthy? Can anyone recommend an online course for WordPress development? I’m a designer who knows as much code as I need for basic web development, mainly using WordPress templates.
Think this was a mistake on their part. WordPress can be a valuable tool and with 25% of all websites developed on WordPress they are missing a large market. WordPress is constantly evolving and learning it’s systems and the full capability of what you can do would be very valuable.
On a recent forum post about this subject this was posted by one of the Treehouse employees:
“Howdy folks!
We’ll have more information to share on this subject soon, but for now, please know that we’re not abandoning WordPress. We will continue to offer quality content on it to our students for the foreseeable future.”
Sounds like there is more to the story then we let to believe…
WordPress is a great web content management system that can effortlessly create powerful websites and web applications. With thousands of built-in tools like themes, frameworks and plugins, WordPress has paved its way to being the most popular content management systems. It’s easy to use admin console ensures that businesses has not to worry about having the trained developers, they can dedicate a few guys to design, develop and manage entire website without the need of technical knowledge. WordPress has a huge and active user community that guides a developer whenever required and ensures that the development process goes smoothly. There are number of tutorials and guides which can be of a good help. Ensure that there is a strategy in place to guide the CMS development process.
Good, WordPress sucks.