The Tikiwiki community is about to release version 1.9 of their CMS. The release is the result of over a year of hard work by the developpers. I contributed to this release with TikiSheet, an online spreadsheet editor, over a year ago and I added a chart rendering engine just before the release. Most would agree adding new features in a stable branch is not a good idea, but I didn’t want to wait until 1.10 to release it.
For a complete list of the major improvements in the release, see WhatsNewIn1.9. It also gives a brief overview of the project and what this release is all about.
I havn’t recieved my certificate yet, but I have been listed as a Zend Certified Engineer. I added the logo on my website. They say 50% of the certified programmers do it. Since I havn’t seen any of those logos anywhere yet, I thought it would be a good idea to help their stats.
The exam itself wasn’t very hard. Of course, there were a few tricky questions, but anyone who worked with PHP seriously shouldn’t have any problems. I read the certification guide before the exam (part of it), and there isn’t really anything special about it. Everything in the exam is in the guide, the exam preparation questions at the end of the chapters are quite accurate in most of the cases (questions in the exam follow the same model, but are not the same). The guide is far from being an interesting read. If you know how to use file streams, string and arrays, you will probably be wasting time reading it. The only things I learned were those things I never bothered using.
There are currently just a little over 400 certified PHP programmers worldwide. Will the certification have any value in a resume?