Episerver CMS 11 (2020 Update) certification tips
Yesterday I renewed my CMS certification (a customary biennial exercise to maintain your ECD status). Capturing my brain dump here while it is still fresh in my head.
There have been a lot of updates in the CMS 11 product in the past 2 years (time certainly flies) and this is reflected in the certification exam. The 2020 updated version of the exam has questions on the Content Delivery API and the latest DXP service features.
Preparation
The exam is not exactly a walk in the park. To earn your Episerver Certified Developer (ECD), you are expected to have a broad knowledge of the product and it measures your developer knowledge and skills. The following preparation is generally recommended
- Experience in a few CMS project implementations prior to taking the exam
- Study the Developer guide
- Review the skills measured in the exam
- Take the Developer e-learning courses (Note these are currently free till 30th June 2020, you get 30 days of access after enrolling in the course)
Exam format
There were 77 multi-choice questions with the required pass rate of 60%.
You get 2 hours, the key tip here is you can skip questions you are unsure of and come back to it later. You cannot go back to answered questions. I tried to spend no more than 1 minute per question and skip it for later if I wasn't confident of the answer.
Some of the answer options are tricky especially the ones where you need to select two or three options so read the question and all the options carefully.
Hints and Tips
Some hints and tips of the knowledge areas to cover (as much as I can remember). Please be mindful that this is not an exhaustive list of the areas that need to be studied.
Product Knowlege
- Review breaking changes in last 2 major versions (10 and 11)
- Review features and add-ons not supported in DXP
- Understand how to programmatically work with projects
- Familiarise yourself with the Editing and Admin UI
Installation, Operation and Configuration
- Requirements for setting up a CMS site
- How to install updates
- Understand the licensing model for cloud-based licensing and multi-site setup
- Review the Backup and Failover definitions in the DXP service description
- Familiarise yourself with the Episerver Visual Studio Extension
- Default location for public and protected add-ons
- Review the "Permissions for Functions" in the Admin UI e.g. how to enable detailed error messages
Content Model
- Familiarise with the Episerver concepts of page types, templates and blocks
- Know the supported property types
- Familiarise with the various property attributes, including validation attributes
- Understand the criteria for refactoring content type and properties e.g when renaming content types
- How to check user access rights on a content
- How to setup preview rendering for a block
- How to use tags to render a property
- How to customise properties using EditorDescriptor and UIHint
- Review the various ways to configure property settings both in code and Admin UI
- How to start a content approval
- Partial routing concepts and the different methods to implement
- Learn how A/B testing works and how to create custom KPIs
- Understanding Content Delivery API - there are a few questions on this so make sure to review it thoroughly
- Episerver Forms configuration including how to configure data encryption
Creating Websites
- ASP.NET Identity setup
- Scenarios for translating content when working with multiple languages
- What happens to the friendly URL when you move pages
- How to setup localisation of the UI
- Location of language XML files
- Where to setup the fallback language
- Understand the configuration of the different cache options (Output, Browser and Object)
- Familiarise with personalising blocks using visitor groups in content areas
- Understanding of both Episerver Search and Episerver Search & Navigation (formerly Find)
- Understand how to filter content for the current visitor
Advanced Concepts
- Understand the areas in the CMS UI where editors can add gadgets
- Attributes required to create plug-ins
- Understand how to configure/disable gadgets for specific roles
- Understand the different ways to add/remove components from the CMS UI
- How to implement, configure and run Scheduled Jobs
- Understand the usage of the InitializationModule and ModuleDependency attribute
- Content Provider concepts
- Working with the Notification API i.e UserNotificationRepository
Hopefully, the above tips help you prepare for your next certification attempt.
Best of luck!!!
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