From training to extensions to training

When Yireo was started in 2011 or so, the idea was to turn it into a tutorial club. Sell videos online. However, quickly after this start, extension development took over instead and Yireo became known as an extension vendor instead. First with Joomla, then with Magento 1, then with Magento 2.

Meanwhile, I, being the founder of Yireo and later on actually also the sole employee of Yireo, kept myself busy more and more with developer training: In The Netherlands, later on thoughout Europe as well. And this resulted in organizing developer conferences like the Magento 2 Seminar, MageTestFest and Reacticon as well. Last October with Reacticon 4, I mentioned however that I don't believe there will be a Reacticon 5 anymore, or a MageTestFest 3 for that matter. Life has changed.

Last year, actually only weeks after the first COVID lockdown in The Netherlands, I started to look into the old idea for creating online videos. And I believed that just creating videos was not good enough to label it as a Yireo thing. It simmered, it was brainstormed upon. And slowly, it became something real.

Phase I (Q1 2021): Vue Storefront 1 and Magento PWA Studio

Working together with a couple of agencies that were in need for specific tutorials, I started to create video courses for Vue Storefront 1 and Magento PWA Studio.

Both topics were familiar for me, because I had helped dozens of agencies already with on-site trainings or classroom trainings on those topics. But instead of being limited to a single day, the concept of a video course allowed me to expand upon things easily. The Vue Storefront 1 training included 9 hours of material and the Magento PWA Studio training included up to be 12 hours. And then sold against a lower price than the original classroom training. Great value.

That was phase I: The videos were shipped with full student notes (all in all, they formed complete books of guiding text). The material was offered on a simple Magento 2 frontend with a custom React component that was just good enough to allow for the content to be shown.

Pause

Phase I was finalized in March 2021 (this year). Afterwards I did want to start Phase II instead. However, life happened. I became dad, Reacticon 4 was organized and I was simply really busy with other stuff. In the background, I slowly started to work on the next phase though.

And now Phase II: Magento 2 frontend & backend development

Phase II is now as good is finalized: A set of 4 new trainings, covering Magento 2 Luma frontend development (with a theming training focused on XML layout and PHP/PHTML, and a followup JavaScript training) and Magento 2 backend development (with topics like composer, module development, database architecture and much much more).

The current counter is at 32 hours of videos, but the expectation iis that this goes up (over time) to about 60 hours of content and more. Again great value.

(wait what, Luma?)

Hmm, I just mentioned a frontend development training on Luma. That's quite something right? I'm famous for advocating more modern approaches (Vue Storefront, PWA Studio and Hyvä). So why focus on an old frontend? Good point, Jisse.

Well, I already had training material for Luma since I organized my first Magento 2 developer training in 2016. So it felt quite doable to turn this into an on-demand training instead. Also, I don't expect that I will deliver another classroom training on Luma in the future. Creating a video course can be seen as my last ode to this legacy frontend.

Okay, Jisse, but what about Hyvä? Good point, Jisse. That's scheduled in February 2022 - let's call that Phase III.

And a great courseware portal

Phase II has also enhanced the React-based courseware portal quite a bit. In a followup blog, I'm keen to share a couple of points on its architecture, because it was (and is) quite fun building it. It now also contains many awesome features that I love sharing.

First of all, all courses that I offer have a preview version that can be visited by navigating to https://training.yireo.com/courseware/ Each course has chapters, each chapter has lessons and most lessons have a video and all of them have student notes. Some lessons are publicly available, others are only available against payment.

And it is not only about the materials themelves: The portal also offers a dashboard that allows you to keep track of which lessons are completed. Lessons can be watched and completed, but they can also be bookmarked or simply liked. All overviews can be searched, filtered by flag and sorted. The main idea behind all of this, is that a student should have the ability to easily find the content he/she is looking for and keep track of which lessons are already done and which lessons are scheduled next.

Redefining what an on-demand training is

All in all, the courses are containing a wealth of information, with videos and student notes to allow for a great learning experience. Not only that, the courseware portal also allows for keeping track of all progress being made.

And I'm extremely proud to have reached this point of completion, to say to the world (well, the Magento community) that it is ready for usage.

Phase III?

The Magento 2 frontend development story of Luma is kind of complete. In the upcoming months and perhaps even years, I will add more and more content to it. But as Luma will become deprecated, there are other plans ahead as well: Hyvä is coming up, Vue Storefront 2 will be covered. Perhaps the current course on Shopware PWA will be turned into an On-Demand training as well.

And for the backend development part, I already have quite some material on things like UiComponents, extension atributes, MSI, ElasticSearch, Varnish and other more advanced topics, so that somewhere in Q1 2022 I will definitely work on courses for those topics.

Yireo On-Demand

So I present you: Yireo On-Demand trainings. Not just videos, but a complete learning environment with an abundance of materials. And I'm eager to hear what you think of it!