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!