Earlier tonight I completed - and passed - the Magento Certification Test, thus becoming a certified Magento developer. I must say the test was not nearly as easy as I thought it would be. The questions are multiple choice but use checkboxes rather than radio buttons. Quite a few of the questions were either obscure, had an ambiguous question or answers or relied entirely on terminology which I wouldn’t consider to be standard in any way. Thankfully, it appears that if you have spent an unreasonable amount of time working on Magento code, as I have, then passing is not impossible. I’d be interested to know what other people thought of it!
I just discovered that realestate.com.au is running a mobile version of their website (as a very trendy beta), which is actually extremely useful. It’s obviously been designed with iPhone users in mind but it was fully functional on my Nokia E71.
Recently I’ve been doing some more “in depth” work with Drupal and I must say I’m very impressed with the power and flexibility of the software. My only problem is that it takes a little while to get my head around some of the new concepts and terminology that Drupal uses. Coming from a Wordpress background (in terms of my most used CMS) I’d say that Drupal is the better choice for any significantly complex CMS site, while Wordpress is much easier to set up and use for a more blog-oriented site. If you haven’t checked out Drupal yet, do yourself a favour and have a look. To save some time and hassle, just install the CCK and Views modules straight away - they’re very handy to have.
Twitter, for those who aren’t aware, is a popular microblogging service. What “microblogging” really means is something of a mystery to me.
I seem to be constantly bemused and irritated by some of the things that I find, or find missing, in my dealings with Magento.
Several times now I have had issues with the Magento admin panel not working as expected. In almost all of these cases the solution has been to simply upload all the core code files again, overwriting what’s there. This is about as brute force an approach as I can imagine - using a hammer instead of a surgeon’s knife if you will - but it seems to do the job in most instances. I recommend doing this as one of your first troubleshooting steps.