April 2024 status update
We are having good times in the H5P community! We are seeing each other more frequently, discussing the things that matter most to us in various forums and enjoying new features and wonderful improvements every month.
Fully open and free webinars have been hosted monthly and will continue to be offered monthly throughout the year. They have been well attended by participants who express that they learn much from these sessions. So far attendees have learned about H5P’s direction and roadmap, how to use the new Game Map content type and great ways to get started with H5P. Upcoming webinars are about live engagement content types (H5P.com only), H5P and AI, and a Branching Scenario training course. Additionally the Core Team will launch free structured training webinars later this year.
I highly recommend joining the AI webinar. More and more of us are getting used to the idea of having artificially intelligent assistants helping us with our everyday tasks. In H5P this is definitely the case with Smart Import where users say it helps them become more than four times faster. I will show how Smart Import works and also how AI chat bots like ChatGPT can be used to generate highly customized H5P content (see the “Training webinar - Different ways to use AI in H5P” on the webinars page).
The ability to customize has been key to the success of H5P. One of the major strengths of H5P is that everything that is possible to do on the web, is possible with H5P. H5P is open source and if we lack necessary functionality, we can just make a new content type. To make this easier, the H5P Core Team has been developing a new development environment making it faster for both new and experienced developers to engineer new content types. Previously it could typically take several hours to set up a Drupal stack and H5P. Now you can instead set up the new development environment in just a couple of minutes.. The development environment is currently used and tested by the most active H5P developers. A few bugs will be fixed and improvements will be made before it is ready for release. If you are a software developer and interested in having a sneak peak, you can check it out on GitHub.
The new development environment is key to the developer experience focus area, one of the five 2024 focus areas. Another focus area is the authoring experience. This past weekend, a highly requested feature for opening and collapsing all fields at once in the authoring tool was implemented. I hope it will be released very soon. For AI, we are getting AI webinars and resources and starting beta testing of Smart Import 2.0 for H5P.com users. The developer experience is being improved by the new development environment and the last focus area is design. The H5P Core Team has demonstrated the new design to many of us through webinars and user testing and implementation is about to begin.
The roadmap does not implement itself. It requires hard work by developers in the H5P community and especially H5P Core Team developers. Two more full time developers recently joined the H5P Core Team and are already contributing with improvements to the authoring experience, while a third is joining May 2nd. A larger core team allows for even more progress towards our roadmap and focus areas. With a significantly better experience for both authors, end users and developers at the end of the year, H5P is set up for continued success in the years to come.
Oh, and for this very site, H5P.org... It has been in need of some TLC for a long time, and has recently been a bit slow and unstable. Core Team members have optimized it now to make it faster and more reliable. The servers will also soon be upgraded with additional resources, and plans are in place to move H5P.org to WordPress.com towards the end of the year to provide a better community experience going forward.
With a bigger community, Core Team and dedicated ambassadors we are progressing at a greater pace than ever. Working hard to spread the word about H5P and improving H5P as a whole. We are all continuing to empower more and more people to create, share and reuse interactive content! Millions use H5P to create interactive content today and soon hundreds of millions will be using it to work together on a global body of interactive resources.
