We've gained two Acquia Drupal Site Builder certificates!Jun 3rd 2015
This now gives us a total of four certificates from the Acquia Certification Programme.

Rick and I took the Acquia Drupal site builder exam yesterday, and we're proud to say we both passed with scores of 90% and higher!

The exam tests you on your knowledge of the functionality of just Drupal core (inc. views), how you would use views and taxonomy, and about the Drupal community. Mainly asking "as a scenario what would you do when/if...".

What advice would we give to others taking the exam?

I felt there were more questions about RSS feeds and taxonomy than I expected. If you're thinking about taking this exam I'd recommend familiarizing yourself with how the Aggregator module and Views Feeds displays work, how to tag nodes with taxonomy, why you would tag them, and what happens when you add, change and delete term reference fields on custom content types. As many of other have said make a note to memorize the permissions table and know how you would reach out to the Drupal community for help, support and issues.

The exam is very Core focused so a few of the questions were tricky because it might not be the way many developers would necessarily do something, especially as many common tasks are achieved using contrib modules which the exam barely covers. Imagine these 2 scenarios for example:

How would you install and enable a theme? Most people would simplify this using Drush, but have you ever installed a theme via the Update manager?

How would you ask for help? If you're an agency developer do you know what other channels are available when you don't have a team to turn to?

Read through the questions carefully and if you have enough time at the end of the test, as many people said they do, double check all the questions and certainly check the ones your unsure of. I know I changed a couple when doing this as it seemed clearer when rereading the questions a second time. For example there were some answers that I initially chose because they were actually the method I would argue is best for achieving something, however there was often a single word clue in the question that made me change my answer after reading the question again.

Hope that helps and good luck if you're thinking of going for it too!

Written by: Kirsty Bewley, Front-end Developer

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