The new site design is a much better platform for some things we’ve got planned for WPShout.

It’s been almost exactly a year since we took over at WPShout. In this year, we’ve published 52+ in-depth WordPress tutorials, written about lots of new, important, and/or cool things in the WordPress space, published an ebook, and really enjoyed ourselves in the process.

Today, we’re excited to announce the launch of a fully redesigned site. (You’re seeing it now!) The new site’s really a step up in prettiness and ease of use—thanks so much to 3thought, the team that helped create the new design. They’re great, and if you ever need to work with true design professionals, they’re your guy and girl.

More importantly, though, the new site is a much better platform for some things we’ve got planned for WPShout. We’d like to talk a bit about those, both to share some of our excitement and to hear your thoughts about what would be helpful for you.

(Before we do that, one thing that’s happening in the very near term: We’ll be publishing the results of the 2014 WordPress Hosting Survey a week from today. Stay tuned!)

What We’ve Got in Store

Below are improvements, additions, and changes we’re looking to roll out at WPShout in the near future.

Article Collections to Help You Grasp a Topic from Start to Finish

An article collection will be a comprehensive mini-manual for a given topic.

One of our major goals for the next couple of months is to organize our individual posts into collections, linked sequences of posts that take a comprehensive look at a single topic.

An article colllection will be a comprehensive mini-manual for a given topic—for example, “authoring a WordPress plugin” or “customizing a child theme”—with an easy-to follow overall introduction and individual articles linked together in a logical way that helps you follow the flow from top to bottom. We’re strongly considering doing a video intro at the beginning of each collection, to help you understand what you’ll be learning and how to navigate the content.

To see this being done well by someone great, check out Pippin’s Plugins. We’ll be doing that, but hopefully even more so.

Our Ebook Package: “The Principles of WordPress Development”

Our ebook package will help you become a full-fledged WordPress developer with a thorough, solid grasp of the fundamentals.

That’s the (very) provisional title of the ebook package we’re putting together. Title aside, we’re shooting for a comprehensive introduction to WordPress development—a set of resources to help the reader become a full-fledged WordPress developer with a thorough, solid grasp of the fundamentals.

The package starts with an ebook, but there’s a lot more to it than that. We’ll be offering:

• A full ebook covering the principles of every major area of WordPress development. It’ll be more than twice as long as the free ebook now available, and full of interactive ways to test your knowledge.
• Comprehensive video walkthroughs on theme and plugin development.
• Interviews with WordPress experts.
• Opportunities for one-on-one consulting help from us.

If you’re interested, the first step is to join our mailing list, and to make yourself part of the e-book’s pre-launch group by setting “I’d like to be notified” to yes below. You’ll get regular exclusive content leading up to the package’s launch, and this also gets you a 20% discount on the ebook itself. Pretty sweet deal!

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If you’re already part of the mailing list and would like to join the pre-launch group, contact us and we’ll be happy to switch you over.

WordPress Tutorials: Basic to Advanced, with a Focus on Quality

We’re committed to continuing our weekly posts on the workings of WordPress. We also want to make sure those posts reach the people they’re right for. In the near future, we’ll be segmenting our posts by difficulty, as follows:

• Basic: The core principles of WordPress, from a user and beginner-developer perspective. Things like setting good permalinks, why a child theme might be a good idea, and mistakes to avoid when making front-end customizations.
• Intermediate: Most things a WordPress developer thinks about: Working with WordPress APIs, building page templates, designing functions, authoring plugins, and so forth.
• Advanced: Cutting-edge and/or speculative uses of WordPress: Things like database abstraction in WordPress, advanced uses of the JSON API, AJAX speed optimizations, and making WordPress talk to other software stacks.

So now would be a good time to know: What confuses you about WordPress? What do you wish someone would take the time to explore, understand, and explain? Tell us all about it, in the comments below or directly. Ask away! We’ve got a track record of turning questions into very detailed posts.

Thanks for Supporting WPShout!

So: What do you think about the elements we’ve laid out above? What are you really excited for? What else that isn’t on this list would help you use WordPress the way you’ve always dreamed?

It’s been a pleasure and an honor to work on the site this year, and there’s a lot more to come. Thanks for reading and supporting us!

Image credit: s0ulsurfing