WordPress Content Creator Community / Peer Support?

  • Unknown's avatar
    sundayslicers · Member ·

    I feel like I must be missing something… surely there are communities of WordPress users, as a safe space for peers to compare notes, do basic testing of the UI/UX of each other’s sites, exchange follows on social media etc etc? I’d expected to find a baffling myriad of options, but instead I can’t find a single one.

    Any guidance on the best one(s) would be greatly appreciated!

    The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)

  • staff-xantium · Staff ·

    Hello there @sundayslicers !

    Thank you for such a great question! It’s awesome that you’ve had your site for 14 years and your interest in learning more and deepening your knowledge of the platform continues! Your site itself is also very bright, clean and attractive!

    You are welcome to start a new topic, and in the process of doing so, you’ll be able to flag this for being looked at by a Forum Moderator. If the question you have is more general, you can share it as a new topic for anyone to answer.

    There is some guidance on the different ways to use the Forums for support, listed in the article I’m sharing below:

    https://wordpress.com/support/getting-help-in-the-forums/

    Additionally, we have an Education Community, where you can connect with fellow WordPress website owners, as they create, test, iterate and learn together:

    https://wordpress.com/forums/forum/education-community/

    These are open forum topics, but also some are created as they go through one of our many courses:

    https://wordpress.com/learn/

    I hope this has been helpful, but feel free to reach out if you have any further questions!

  • Unknown's avatar
    sundayslicers · Member ·

    Hi staff-xantium

    Thanks for the positive feedback on the site. My tenure with WordPress is misleading though – I may have created an account 14 years ago, but it’s only in the past few months that I’ve been using it properly.

    I don’t really understand your guidance – you say I’m welcome to start a new topic… isn’t that what I did? I checked the link, and there’s support or translation forums… so surely I’m in the right one? Do I really need to start again with a duplicate thread to tag a Forum Moderator?!

    The Education Community link is useful, though it doesn’t look very active in there. I’m convinced there’s some other places that people are connecting. Are you not able to tell me if it’s not within WordPress?

  • staff-doublebassd · Staff ·

    Hey there,

    You’re right – there is no need to create a new thread, as that is what you have done. We could move your post over to the education community subforums since it is more in line with what you are looking for, but you are also correct that it is a newly created forum with little traffic at the moment.

    However, we are looking to change that soon, as we do have a deep desire to further cultivate the WordPress.com community. There isn’t a definitive, thriving community forum online for WordPress.com users, and I believe that has a lot to do with people excessively spamming their sites/services. But we want to work on establishing a healthy, vibrant, well-moderated community and would love to have users like you a part of it.

    So, I encourage you to post a question in the education community forums. You never know – your post might be the catalyst for something great for our community!

    Let us know if you have any questions.

  • Unknown's avatar
    2020testjj · Member ·

    There’s an active education forum that accompanies the courses/webinars that feed into it. You might be interested in some of the offerings there: https://wordpress.com/learn/

  • Unknown's avatar
    sundayslicers · Member ·

    Thanks @staff-doublebassd – that was helpful information. I’m still perplexed – 42% of the internet is powered by WordPress, and there’s no active, thriving community of users supporting each other? Tempted to create one!

    I’ll post in the Education community and see where it goes.

  • Unknown's avatar
    sundayslicers · Member ·

    Thanks for the input @2020testjj – I’ve had a look at the offerings and will consider if any of them are relevant.

  • staff-totoro · Staff ·

    Hi @sundayslicers

    I’m still perplexed – 42% of the internet is powered by WordPress, and there’s no active, thriving community of users supporting each other? Tempted to create one!

    It may help to clarify that the vast majority of WordPress sites are not hosted on WordPress.com (we are the official managed host for WordPress) but instead are “self-hosted” by folks who have downloaded the free open-source version of WordPress that is available here: https://wordpress.org/

    Note that we’re WordPress.com so that is a different site. We do have a smaller community here, but most site owners who “self-host” do not have reason to post in these forums. The version of WordPress they use is un-managed and does not have the same built in features and optimized hosting environment that we have here. I’m sure that these folks have informally created communities on Facebook, Quora, Reddit, and other places.

    However, the open-source version of WordPress is very DIY and requires some technical expertise to manage it manually, including the need to make code changes and deal with server configuration issues. So discussions in these communities tend to be more developer-focused and cover advanced issues that are not shared by site owners exactly.

    One prominent community you can find is here, though it is one that is focused on building and improving WordPress (the platform) and not as much focused on designing and managing personal sites: https://make.wordpress.org/

    Also you can find more support-related discussions here, but if you need help with your WordPress.com site specifically (say you are having an issue with your site of some kind) we don’t recommend posting there since we would be better able to help. I think that Facebook tends to have more site owner-focused communities but we’re not directly involved in these, so we are not able to make specific suggestions.

    But as mentioned previously, we do have a community (in the early stages) here on WordPress.com. We welcome your posts and I also want to point out that our education staff (the same ones who create content on https://wordpress.com/learn) also monitor and participate in discussions there. Hope to see your posts!

    Hope that helps. Please let us know if you have any more questions.

  • Unknown's avatar
    sundayslicers · Member ·

    Thanks @staff-totoro – I was aware of the .org business (very confusing when trying to understand propositions and then finding help for the right one). I’m on the right one, but didn’t realise that the support / community was patchy – hoped it would be superior based on paying for a SaaS solution.

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