Looking for a new Drupal job or searching for Drupal clients? Or maybe you simply want to make it official and add a Drupal certification to your résumé? In this article you’ll read about how I got the Drupal Grandmaster certification over a weekend. I’ll also share some tips for people who are preparing for Acquia’s Drupal Certification test and some other valuable information related to the tests.
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In many lines of work, especially in IT, getting a certification can make a world of difference. Whether you have a job as a Drupal developer or you’re simply freelancing, having certain certificates can affect your career positively.
Acquia is a very popular name in the world of Drupal. Getting their Drupal certification might help you get an edge over your competitors – whether you’re applying for a job or trying to get your next project.
Two Minute Version
- Becoming an Acquia certified Drupal Developer or Grandmaster can affect your career positively.
- The certification tests are substantially expensive.
- You need to do some preparation because certain questions cannot be answered from mere experience – Reading Drupal API docs is very helpful.
- Taking the online test is quite easy and economic – you save on transport and you can do the test comfortably from home.
- You get the results immediately after submitting the test. A certificate is emailed to you immediately in case you pass.
- Your name appears on the Acquia certification directory within 24 hours.
My Experience
I had been thinking about getting a Drupal 8 certification ever since I started working with Drupal 8 in mid 2016. Also, the company I work for, Evolving Web, have certain clients who value having certified Drupal developers on their projects. This gave me the extra push that I needed to get the Drupal 8 Grandmaster certification. Besides, my employers bore half the certification expenses for which I am very thankful to them.
I had only 2 kinds of preps for the test – first, 3 years of Drupal 8 experience; second, reading Drupal API docs. Having done the test, I realized that reading the API docs is really helpful. I could’ve answered most of the questions from experience, but since the tests cost a lot, I didn’t want to take chances.
I registered for most of my tests less than an hour before taking them. Things went quite well, except for some tricky questions. I got the following scores in my Drupal 8 tests:
- Acquia Certified Developer: 90.00%
- Acquia Certified Back End Specialist: 93.33%
- Acquia Certified Front End Specialist: 83.33%
I did 2 of the tests with a headache because I hadn’t slept well the night before and I finished my tests in around 45-75 minutes. In most cases, my name became visible in the Acquia certification directory within an hour and my name was added to the Drupal grandmaster directory in a day.
Apart from the unexpected tricky questions, I had one more problem. The formatting on my front end specialist certificate had an error. The certification date was overlapping the title and I had to contact the certification team. They tried their best to change it to match my other certs, but in the end, I decided to take matters in my own hand and fix it with Photoshop.
Test Structure
In short, expect to relive your school days! At least I did. Expect a variety of questions related to problems which you’d face while building a Drupal site – from site-building, to debugging PHP code, to mini-challenges in HTML/CSS/JS and most importantly, some tricky questions which will leave you scratching your head.
There is no live coding – all you need to do is choose 1-3 correct answers from a pool of 4-5 options. Yes, they’re all multiple-choice questions! If you’ve built 2-3 real Drupal sites, you should be able to pass with ease.
Acquia Drupal 8
Online test
To do the test online, you need to register for it and install a piece of software called Sentinel. This software will prevent you from accessing any other apps during the exam. Besides, a supervisor will keep watch and hear you during the entire test, so you need to have a mic and a camera on your computer. This is why it is also called the online “proctored” test.
On the day of the test, go online 5-10 minutes in advance and you should be able to launch it from the online portal. Before you start, remember to be in a quiet room without any distractions – preferably alone. You cannot leave your seat, look around, use your phone or do any suspicious activities during the test. The test should last for around 45-75 minutes and you’ll receive the results as soon as you submit your answers.
On site test
I did the test online, so I don’t know much about this option. I would recommend doing it online because it is more comfortable – you will save time and money ?
Certifications
There are 4 possible certifications you can aim for, depending on your requirements. They are listed below in the order of difficulty of their relevant tests.
- Acquia Certified Drupal Site-builder: Certifies that you can use Drupal’s admin interface to build a website and manage content without any coding skills.
- Acquia Certified Drupal Developer: Certifies that you can build sites and that you can deal with common Drupal back end and Drupal front end challenges.
- Acquia Certified Drupal Front End Specialist: Certifies that you can do Drupal development and that you can tackle most problems that a Drupal front end developer might face.
- Acquia Certified Drupal Back End Specialist: Certifies that you can do Drupal development and that you can tackle most problems that a Drupal back end developer might face.
Acquia Certified Drupal Grandmaster
Though this one has a cool title, you won’t get any certificate for it. If you pass the Drupal Developer, Drupal Front End Specialist and the Drupal Back End Specialist exams, your name starts appearing on Acquia’s directory of Drupal Grandmasters.
How to Prepare
Classes and Training
Acquia suggests taking preparatory training offered by them. The tests themselves are quite expensive, so I’d assume the classes are equally (or more) pricy. Besides Acquia, there are many independent Drupal training institutions that might help you prepare for the certification test.
That said, you can either invest in a training or if you’re a DIY person like me, you should try to get some hands-on experience and build at least one website with Drupal. But remember that there is no shame in taking classes/training – choose what suits you the most. The ultimate goal should be to become a better site-builder/developer – be it now or in a few years.
Programming Experience
Needless to say, Drupal is just a CMS built on PHP, so, make sure you know sufficient PHP and related tech like HTML/CSS/JS. You should also know certain programming concepts and best practices. Git is an integral part of any dev workflow and you should know commonly used git practices and commands to become a good developer. Drush and Drupal Console are also very commonly used tools in any Drupal development workflow.
Drupal Experience
For developers, back end or front end, I’d recommend building at least 3 websites with the version of Drupal for which you want to get certified. Try to solve all the problems that you face during these projects.
You can also try building a module that makes use of all the common APIs, for example, routing API, controller API, database API, entity API and theming-related APIs. Also, explore popular core and contrib modules to widen the horizons of your knowledge.
Contribution
You can contribute to the Drupal community in the form of patches, translations, reviews or even bug reports and feature suggestions. This should give you an idea about how the Drupal community works along with some practice. Safari passwords to lastpass. Contributing will also make your Drupal.org profile look cooler because it will start showing a list of issues on which you worked. Spyder ide download for python.
Read API Docs
![Acquia drupal hosting Acquia drupal hosting](/uploads/1/3/7/7/137789355/597904326.png)
The most valuable tip for devs: Read all Drupal API docs related to your field of expertise. You don’t need to know all the details but at least the things you would regularly run into. Know the commonly used admin menu items, hooks, base classes and concepts.
![Acquia Drupal Acquia Drupal](/uploads/1/3/7/7/137789355/544511758.png)
I don’t need to know everything, I just need to know where to find it when I need it.
For several years, I've done all my local development with the help of Acquia's Dev Desktop. It's a specialized *AMP (MAMP, for me!) suite for Drupal that'll let you launch new projects rapidly. It's free to use and doesn't need any specific integration with Acquia. If you're working on your own independent Drupal project, it can still be a great solution. I was recently roped into testing a virtual machine for Drupal via the Drupal VM project.
Acquia Dev Desktop: An Aging Local Environment
The usefulness of Acquia Dev Desktop has started to falter with more of our development work shifting to Drupal 8. Composer integration is non-existent with Dev Desktop. Composer has become the defacto standard package manager in the world of Drupal 8.
You use Composer for doing things like installing modules in the world of Drupal, a task that used to be handled with Drush. Acquia itself recommends dev environments other than Dev Desktop at the enterprise level. I've seen this when working with their ACSF or BLT products.
An entire Virtual Machine to run Drupal
For that reason, I've started using Drupal VM for more projects. While it doesn't have the local machine app-level interface to use, it does offer up a good browser-based dashboard. It's built on top of Vagrant so there's an existing world of command-line tools, community integrations, and help guides.
Being an entire Virtual Machine, Drupal VM naturally offers more flexibility in how you configure your local development stack. However, it's also more work than simply installing a tool like Acquia Dev Desktop. I could often kick-off a new project in Dev Desktop in ten minutes. I'd say it took me a few hours to get Drupal VM and its base requirements (Vagrant, Ansible) configured with an operating Drupal 8 environment.
Drupal VM is definitely more effort to get started but brings with it full control over an environment. I do enjoy SSH'ing into my local Drupal VM and being able to execute standard command-line tasks on the virtual machine. The integration to your local disk makes it easy to do things like export your Drupal 8 configuration (good old 'drush cim'). You can do this from within an SSH session on the VM and find that the config is immediately available on your actual local disk site folder ready to commit with Git and send on its way to the repository.
Drupal VM's Workflow and Integrations
Although you can of course use your own local SQL tools, Drupal VM comes with Adminer. Celeste aida karaoke. It's a lightweight PHP-based database management tool for RDBMS. Other than MySQL, it also supports SQLite, PostgreSQL, and Oracle. It's similar to PHPMyAdmin, taking some design and functional cues from it.
One of the biggest issues I've had with Acquia Dev Desktop as of late is Composer integrations. Really, it's the lack of Composer compatibility. Drupal 8's recommend setup process and dev/test/prod environment workflow now revolves around leveraging Composer. It's used to manage much of the third-party libraries, modules, etc that a Drupal project has. Historically, I've committed nearly everything to Git. I've handled deployments almost entirely with Git.
Now, in modern Drupal 8 projects, Git is merely given the installation and update lists. With the ingredient file in Git, deployments revolve around migrating the requirements between environments and using Composer to install or update packages.
Leaving Dev Desktop for Drupal VM
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Having significant freedom with how to use Composer and designing a workflow has become a vital part of managing live Drupal 8 sites with a multi-environment workflow. I've felt like Acquia Dev Desktop just doesn't jive with the modern Drupal 8 flow as it did with Drupal 7.
Acquia Drupal Training
Daymuse has migrated more sites to Drupal 8 and has all new development in Drupal 8 (even as our last Drupal 8 getting started post is a little dated). I sadly have less of a reason to use my old standby Dev Desktop icon on my Mac's Dock. While I think Drupal VM is still working through growing pains, I'm happy to see a more modern development environment to work in day-to-day. I recommend checking out the project.