Acquia Certified Site Builder - Drupal 8
Earlier this week I took and passed the Acquia Certified Site Builder exam for Drupal 8. Here are some tips and a few resources that helped me prepare for this 50 question, 75 minute exam.
Acquia Academy
These free Drupal courses for the community were a big help. It has been several years since I have done any site building with Drupal and it was like going back to my home town, barely recognizable. The exam questions are mostly scenario based and the Building a Basic Site Using Drupal 8 course covers some of these. The videos also walk through the various administration menus that you will need to be familiar with.
wadmiraal/drupal
For the Acquia Academy Site Builder course, I used the Docker image created by wadmiraal to run Drupal locally. It was also handy for experimentation since the Drupal site could easily be reset to that of a fresh install. If you are already familiar with Docker, then this won’t add much to your plate on top of preparing for the Site Builder exam. Otherwise, I recommend sticking with the Drupal environment solutions covered in the courses. Another bonus is that this image comes with Devel and Drush already setup. Drupal Console is also ready for installation when advancing to the developer track.
Keys
Here are few tips and scenarios to consider when studying.
- Understand how to create custom content types and how to modify their display.
- Understand Taxonomy use for content categorization.
- Understand how to create content relationships. There are good examples using Events and Sponsors in the Acquia Academy Site Builder course to demonstrate this.
- Understand how to use blocks in the page layout. For example, using blocks to reuse header and footer content assets in various ways.
- Understand Users, Roles and Permissions and how to change what a certain group of users can do in terms of content workflow.
- Understand how to handle a compromised User account.
- Understand how to handle comment spam.
- Understand how to administer the core cache modules, including views data caching that is tucked away under the Advanced Views settings.
- Understand the various Display modes.
- Understand how to create pages and blocks with Views.
- Understand best practices when communicating with the Drupal community. For example, when an issue is encountered with a module.
- The Site Builder course at Acquia Academy uses a couple of contributed modules. The Devel module is used to generate a bunch of content nodes to demonstrate views and filters, etc. Pathauto is used to demonstrate generation of path aliases. Token and Ctools are required by Pathauto, so they also need to be installed. It is useful to know where to find and how to install modules. However, if a given scenario can be solved using core modules, that answer is preferred.
