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Umbraco training news: certification updates & a brand new course about security

Umbraco training world continues to grow

Andrew Author
Written by Andrew Barta

Recently we introduced you to Load Balancing, another Umbraco training course that’s fresh-from-the-oven. And just like Load Balancing, the brand new course of today, Umbraco Security, originated at Codegarden (which is in just 2 months?!). Last year at Codegarden Umbraco HQ’er and PR guru Sebastiaan Janssen hosted his very popular Hack Your Own Website workshop. With the popularity of this workshop we saw the need and want for a course dedicated to securing your Umbraco websites. So there you go, Umbraco Security. Do all those new courses mean changes to your Master title? Andrew will tell you more about the new course as well give you an update to the certification program:

What is this new course about?

Most of us are aware that we live in an age with (unfortunately) quite frequent data breaches and are all too familiar with companies contacting us to change our password when sensitive data was accessed by someone who was not supposed to do so.

In the Umbraco Security training you will learn best practices to ensure your sites are safe from potential threats.

In the course, we begin by discussing how the Umbraco HQ structures our own security around the CMS. From there, we move on to understanding the possible threats, and then hack our own demo site to showcase potential vulnerabilities. Finally, we move on to solving them. We will cover general security practices along with Umbraco specific security topics to be aware of and how to utilize the full force of the Umbraco CMS.

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If you’ve ever worked with internet security before you probably know how easy it can be to accidentally leave vulnerabilities on your site. If you haven’t worked with security before let’s just say this … “on the internet, attack is easier than defense.” - Bruce Schneier (American Cryptographer and Computer Security Professional)

Who is this course for?

The target audience for this course are Umbraco Developers, Designers and Technical Users who want to learn the best practices to secure their Umbraco sites thus protecting any sensitive information.

What do you need to be ready for it?

The course is not tech-heavy and is relative to some of our skill focused courses such as Load Balancing or Search and Indexing. However, having a baseline understanding of web traffic and Umbraco will serve you well. With that said, we've structured the course in a way to provide a background about each topic before diving into the exercises. This way if a certain topic is unfamiliar, we will introduce the idea and then get some hands on experience with the implementation. 

What will this course give you?

By the end of this course you will have a good understanding of how to secure your Umbraco sites from hackers and potential threats.

Some of the topics this course covers are:

  • Overview of Transport layer security - TLS / HTTPS
  • Latch or Adding Certificates Manually
  • Understanding the Threat
  • Forcing HTTPS
  • Security headers
  • Content security policy
  • Two factor authentication
  • How to hide Umbraco Login Page
  • And more!

Updates to the Umbraco Certification Program

Alright! With the new course introduced, we also have a few exciting updates to the whole Umbraco Certification Program.

But first, we have to start with new course categories.

New Course Categories

The Umbraco Training offerings have changed dramatically over the years. Starting off with the founder and Chief Unicorn of Umbraco Niels Hartvig, having folks fly to Denmark to walk through the installation of Umbraco, to the famous Level 1 and Level 2 trainings, to 1-day course offerings of specific skill sets that we have today. 

As you can see, things have changed a lot since the beginning. Now we have a large enough course base that some structure needed to be added. And so the new structure is broken down into three categories:

🎓 Fundamentals:

- Fundamentals course

🎓 Foundation Courses:

- Extending the Backoffice

- MVC and Visual Studio

- Application Integration

- Security

🎓 Skill Courses:

- Cloud Developer

- Load Balancing

- Searching and Indexing

- More to come.


What about certifications points?

The current structure of the Umbraco Certification consists of 3 levels: Umbraco Certified Professional (100 points), Umbraco Certified Expert (200 points) and Umbraco Certified Master (300 points).

And up until now, the certification point structure has been based on the courses that we offer at the time of the program. We are proud to announce that we now have a defined structure for the program moving forward!

What is changing? The Umbraco Certified Professional and Umbraco Certified Expert titles will remain unchanged, while Umbraco Certified Master will now require you to earn a few more points:

  • To become an Umbraco Certified Professional you’ll need to earn a 100 points;
  • To become an Umbraco Certified Expert you’ll need to earn 200 points.
  • To become an Umbraco Certified Master you’ll now need to earn 350 points. The 350 points will require the following courses: the Fundamentals course, all 4 Foundation Courses, and 1 Skill Course. The reason for this comes from the new structure of our course offerings and the introduction of Umbraco Security course. Read more about why we’re introducing this change below.

Why the update to Master title?

With the expansion of our course material, it is not necessary to include all courses to call oneself a Master, as 3 of 8 courses are very specific and more skill-focused. Instead, we have selected the most pertinent courses that we deem necessary to award the title of Umbraco Certified Master along with 1 of the 3 Skill Courses.

Additionally, we want the individuals who have obtained this status to take pride in their achievement. 

The specific structure of the new course categories allows them to explain exactly what goes into calling oneself an Umbraco Master: covering the fundamentals and basic building blocks, along with extending Umbraco, working with the MVC pattern, integrating with Umbraco, and last but certainly not least, the ability to secure their Umbraco sites.

Once all of the Foundation Courses are obtained we think it is fitting for a Master to have another skill that sets them apart, hence, 1 of the Skill Courses.

In addition to this, now that we have clearly defined what it takes to be an Umbraco Master, we will be able to add more skill courses without needing to change the requirements of your Umbraco certification status. 

I’m an Umbraco Certified Master, how do I maintain my status?

Not to worry! We got you covered. Since we are announcing this update now, we want to give you plenty of time to get up to speed so you can maintain your certification status.

You will hold your Certified Master status until the end of 2019. That gives you the rest of the year to take the new Umbraco Security course to ensure you have all of the Foundation Courses! Oh and did we mention the security course will be online 😉

This is awesome! Where do I sign up?

Very simple. Read about the course and book your seat right here:

Book Umbraco Security Course >>

 

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