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)
- CMS Advanced Development
- Developing for DXC Service

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