At the moment I'm writing this, it is the Tuesday after TYPO3 certiFUNcation. I still need some time to handle all the information received on that day. In this post I will try to give you a short recap of the event and will share the information, I think is important to know.
TYPO3 certiFUNcation is an event wich is all about getting certified as a TYPO3 editor, integrator, developer or consultant. But maybe even more about having fun with other people from the TYPO3 community. It was organized in Phantasialand Germany so besides getting certified, you can easily do some rollercoasters during lunch.
Besided doing the exams for the certifications, there were also a wide variety of presentations. Personally I updated the people that attended my talk about the new SEO possibilities in core, but also about Yoast SEO for TYPO3.
It was also possible to re-certificate an earlier passed exam by attending two mandatory talks. The first of Mathias Schreiber about the new features of TYPO3. The other mandatory talk was by Helmut Hummel about Hardening TYPO3. If you visited those presentations, your current certificates were expanded with 1 year.
The most important part was ofcourse the exams of the certifications. About 7 years ago, I passed my exam as a TYPO3 integrator and now I thought it was useful to update that certificate by doing the TCCI exam.
I have to admit that my preparations weren't that good. On a daily base, I'm using a lot of the stuff you have to know for the TCCI exam. After checking half of the questions in the (unofficial) preparation book, I tought it was ok and stopped prepairing myself any further. But during the exam it was clear that the new parts were at the end of the book. So at the end, it was quite a challenge. Hopefully I passed the exam, otherwise I can only blame myself.
Of course I won't tell you anything about the exam itself. Besides everybody signes a non-disclosure-agreement, you have to do this based on your own knowledge. Don't learn answers, but try to get what is ment. Learn about the topics mentioned in the syllabus and maybe do some example questions in the preparation book. Also your own experience is often quite important.
When not doing exams and not riding rollercoasters, you could attend presentation about all kinds of topics. I will highlight the presentations I attended and found useful for other developers. Want to see a video stream of the main stage? TYPO3 GmbH was there with their video-equipment to do a livestream of the event. You can view it on YouTube.
After we started a little later because registration of the event was delayed, the keynote speaker was Jonas Weber. He was telling us that not every problem with rankings in search engines are due to updates from the search engine. Most of the times it is about you. With some nice statistics Jonas showed that a lot of the ranking problems are due to technical issues and content. At MaxServ and Yoast we call this holistic SEO, all things need to be right.
As Jonas showed a lot of the times with major drops in rankings, one of the most repeating issues was that people tried to fool the search engines or didn't had their tech stuff right. This is one of the reasons I started the TYPO3 SEO Initiative. To get your basic SEO tech stuff right. Out-of-the-box!
One of the topics that can't be repeated enough is the talk by Mathias Schreiber of TYPO3 GmbH about the version 9 release. Because the delayed schedule, he had to rush up his presentation a bit. But he told us about what features are already in the version 9 release and on which topics the core contributors are working and trying to get done before the 9LTS release.
If you have the opportunity to attend a presentation of Mathias about the future, it is always good to stay even if you have heard it before. I've heard his presentation about version 9 about 5 times now and everytime I hear new information.
Besides the presentation of Mathias, there was another mandatory presentation if you wanted to recertificate at TYPO3 certiFUNcation. It was the presentation of Helmut Hummel about hardening TYPO3. In his talk Helmut told us how you can secure your TYPO3 installation so it will be a lot harder to hack your website.
He started about the operating system and that it is important to do a couple of things like removing FTP access, update your OS regularly and disable services you don't use.
After that he talked about securing the webserver. One of the most important things he had to say was secure your webserver with HTTPS. Also you don't need to use EXT:rsaauth because it doesn't protect you. Helmut also showed which folders needs write acces and adviced to make sure other folders the webserver have no writeaccess to. Within the folders with write access, it should not be possible to excecute PHP files.
A lot of those things will need automation, but only by automating the setup of your installations, will provide you the most secure installations.
For the TYPO3 part one of the most important things is to update your CMS regularly and to make sure your debug systems are set correctly so you don't have any debug information outputted. Also make sure you only deploy code you use. Every line of code is a potential risk. So again: only deploy code you need.
The presentation had a lot of usefull information that you already might know. Personally I had some "ofcourse" moments and are implementing some extra security rules already. If you want to see the slides, take a look at his speackerdeck page.
I also did a presentation on TYPO3 certiFUNcation and it was ofcourse about SEO with TYPO3. In the presentation I showed what it was in the past to deal with SEO related issues, how it is now and how it will be in the future with TYPO3 CMS v9LTS. I also talked about the new features we will implement on Yoast SEO for TYPO3 and Yoast SEO Premium for TYPO3.
With the TYPO3 SEO initiative we already introduced some basic SEO fields in core and those get also rendered out-of-the-box by the newly introduced MetaTagAPI. In the future we will add things like SitemapAPI, schema.org etc. More information about that can be found on the page of the initiative on typo3.org.
I also gave a demo on the current version of the Yoast plugins and how to use them.
My own slides can also be found on slideshare as well.
There were more presentations but to be honest. Besides doing my exams and my own presentation I also tried to have fun with colleagues and other friends from the TYPO3 community. Luckily you can find all presentations on SlideShare and there is also a recording of the main hall which can be found on YouTube which can be found below.
As also in the title TYPO3 certiFUNcation mentioned, the event is also a lot about having fun. On this event I met a lot of old and new TYPO3 friends. Altough you see people only a couple of times a year, you have one big interest in common: TYPO3. And it was in Phantasialand, so what do you do in the "spare" time? Riding rollercoasters! They really do have really cool rollercoasters and especcialy the Taron is my favorite. The adrenaline you get by riding Taron, is like a day working on new features in core: bumpy, but really satisfying!
Altough no new date is already given, I really think next year there will be a new TYPO3 certiFUNcation. And I hope by reading this post, you got inspired and that I can meet you in person on the next edition of TYPO3 certiFUNcation!
See you next year!
Do you have a question? Do you want to work together? Just send me a message and I will get in touch as soon as possible.
