How to run the official product demos in WordPress release cycles

Rich Tabor and I have taken on the new product demos in the last two WordPress release cycles: Your WordPress 6.2 Preview and WordPress 6.3 Live Product Demo – Highlights & Recording. To spread the love and ensure others can contribute in this way, I wanted to share at a high level how we prepare and to encourage others to raise their hand if they’d like to take this on in the future. The steps right now are pretty simple but the details and effort going into each are immense:

1. Determine priority features to highlight. 
2. Create a flow for going through each feature. 
3. Write a loose script and divide up the work.
4. Create a demo site to show off the release. 

Along the way, you’ll need to coordinate with the Marketing release leads to post about the event, wrangle the zoom, and confirm a host. Let’s go through each step for this specific role in a bit more detail. Keep in mind that each release offers its own set of unique opportunities and challenges so this can’t be defined in great detail without losing the nuance. 

Step 1: Determine priority features to highlight

Since 5.8, I’ve written some version of a Source of Truth, gathering all of the various items of a release into a single document, and have begun sharing it publicly the last few releases (6.3 Source of Truth). I’m not going to go into detail around how those resources are created but suffice it to say that this often creates the foundation for determining priorities. It pulls from trac tickets for the release milestone, Gutenberg Release posts, in progress developer notes for the release, and the recently launched developer blog. A swirling amount of work is done to bring together highlights across the WordPress community during the timeframe of the product demo from marketing to training to docs and more. For our purposes, we’ve leaned on the source of truth and you could too if you wanted to step up to run the demo or run your own for a different community!

Step 2: Create a flow for going through each feature

This is usually a back and forth dialogue, partially constrained by any current in progress work and with a priority for smoothness. The demo isn’t meant to be a stress test of the features but is meant to show off the power of them and connect the features to a wider narrative of the release and the WordPress project as a whole.   

Step 3: Write a loose script and divide up the work

The script is usually quite rough sometimes with fully written sentences to ensure we get every last detail right and sometimes just a high level note in place. The aim is to keep us on track, know when we hand off to each other, and have a compiled list of links ready to go for easy recapping after the fact. This also ensures that for any specific areas we might have something to share, we can be attuned to leaving space for one another to dive in.

Here’s an excerpt from the latest demo:

• Introduce the command palette
• Navigate and command WordPress
• Different contexts
• CMD K: css 
• REFRESH back to site editor home
• Point out the new menu items of the sidebar
• Jump into Pages
  • Browse and edit your pages in the site editor
  • Content and template editing
    • Title, post content, add featured image
  • Drafting and publishing new pages from the site editor
  • Hand over to Anne to talk the improvements on the Navigation front
• Navigation (Anne)
  • Edit navigation in isolation and in the sidebar, not just readme
  • Drag to reorder and make submenus
  • Changes based on number of menus available and complexity.
• Styles (Anne)
  • Style variations pulled into this area now (don’t apply one)
  • Quickly view the style book
  • Future note: fonts.
  • Hand over to Rich to talk about templates.

Step 4: Create a demo site to show off the release

Simply put, Rich rocks this with wonderful patterns, excellent style choices, and more. We ensure the demo site is set up with what’s needed to show off the features and the latest version of nightly WordPress so we’re up to date. This will mean creating certain content ahead of time that uses specific blocks or setting up patterns to act as starter content for creating a new template. This is key to making the demo smooth and predictable, especially when jointly presenting. The demo site should both offer easy access and opportunities to show off what’s to come in a clear and compelling well. Sometimes that means staging a situation (creating a page with certain blocks) and sometimes that means leaving an opening (leave an option we can enable off to give us a chance to show turning it on). 

What are the expectations? Who is best suited to help here? 

Right now, to facilitate these demos, you will need a level of capacity and expertise to stay up to date with the release, understand the nuances of features in order to answer questions, and find specific ways to show off what’s being built. In the future, I could see the work divided across more people to allow each person to go deep in certain areas without needing to look across as much but, in the current iteration, you need to be able to look across and go deep. This is especially true when it comes to the Q&A and talking about the overarching vision of what’s being added in terms of the larger roadmap being worked on. Tied to this, you need a design eye or need to work with a designer to get the site in tip top shape (this is just one of the many ways teaming up with Rich has been clutch). 

Reach out if you’re interested

If you’re interested in doing these product demos and want to chat more, let me know! I’m @annezazu in WordPress.org slack or you can contact me. I’d love to ensure others can take this on in the future both to spare my introverted soul and to ensure a diverse set of folks can step into the spotlight. As folks have questions, ask away too and I’ll update this post with my answers.