site builder

Another year, another Acquia Certification exam... (wait—I think I've said that before).

The latest of the updated Acquia Certification Exams is the Acquia Certified Drupal 8 Site Builder. It's meant for the average Drupal site builder to test and evaluate familiarity with building websites using Drupal 8, and it's the same as all the previous exams in style: a series of 40 questions posed in the conversational manner, with answers you would provide if you were telling a project manager or site owner how you would implement a feature.

Recovering from surgery finally gave me time to update my last D6 site—a 7 year old private photo and media sharing site with nearly 10,000 nodes and 20+ GB of content—to Drupal 8. Drupal 8 has become a lot more mature lately, to the point where I'm comfortable building a site and not having the foundation rot out from beneath as large ecosystem shifts have mostly settled down.

One thing that I thought would have the simplest implementation actually took a little while to figure out. I needed to have users' full name display instead of their usernames throughout the site. For D6 (and for similar D7 use cases), the easiest way to do this was to enable the Realname module, configure it a tiny bit, and be done with it.

In Drupal 8, however, Realname doesn't yet have a full release (see this issue for progress), and the way usernames are generated has changed slightly (see change record hook_username_alter() changed to hook_user_format_name_alter()).

After taking the trifecta of Acquia Developer Certification (General, Back-end, Front-end) exams and earned a new black 'Grand Master' sticker, I decided to complete the gauntlet and take the Acquia Certified Drupal Site Builder Exam at DrupalCon LA.

Taking the test in Acquia's testing center was a welcome reprieve from taking the exams online. There's much less of a 'big brother' feel when you don't have a 'sentinel' application running on your computer and a camera focusing on your face the entire time. Also, the exam room is nice and quiet, and has a good 'library' vibe to it.