The New Adobe ColdFusion Certification Training

Now that the videos are live, people have signed up, and all the wheels are in motion, I’m officially allowed to talk about it:

There is a new Adobe ColdFusion Certification program available!

Earlier this year we partnered with Adobe and rebuilt the entire ColdFusion Certification program for ColdFusion 2018.  There is now an updated series of videos for getting developers started with writing modern ColdFusion code, and it’s being provided by Adobe. Additionally, the Adobe ColdFusion Certification program is back — developers can once again get a certificate of proficiency in ColdFusion just like the old days!

The certification hadn't been updated (nor was it even available) for around 15 years — things were well overdue for refreshing. Adobe and I compiled a list of topics for a “ColdFusion Fundamentals” series of videos — then I got to work coding demos, writing scripts, creating take after take of screen recordings, and now we have roughly 20 videos available, covering a variety of topics.  

What's In The Training?

Our target audience for the videos was developers with about 1 year of experience writing code, that are looking to get an understanding of how modern development works in CFML.

Topics covered include some programming basics (arrays, structures, and the various loops constructs), scoping variables, writing modular code (functions, cfinclude, components, custom tags — and the pros and cons of each), core Object Oriented Programming concepts (inheritance, composition, interfaces, models, controllers, implicit accessors), using the PDF functionality, newer constructs such as member functions, the ternary operator, and so on. Topics like how to write secure CFML, best practices for uploading files, encoding forms and securing SQL queries are also included.

By design, we stopped just short of things like full blown frameworks. Nor did we get into some of the more niche uses of ColdFusion (meaning, topics such as connecting to a Microsoft Exchange server are intentionally left off).  Perhaps there will be some other “add on training” for those things later, I don’t really have any official info that, tho I’d certainly like to see it happen!

Where Can I Get Certified?

At this year's Adobe ColdFusion Summit, developers can sign up for an all-day pre-certification workshop where folks will be able to ask whatever questions they have before taking the test. Ideally, at the end of the workshop, everyone will take the test and get a ColdFusion Certification.

Registration for the ColdFusion Summit is still open, and there are some slots left in the pre-conference workshop for anyone looking to get a ColdFusion Certification.

What's Next?

For folks not able to be at this year’s ColdFusion Summit, I know there is talk of doing certification training elsewhere later on, however I don’t have any idea what plans are confirmed just yet. If you’re interested in this or related ColdFusion training, I would encourage you to reach out so you can get you more information when it becomes available.

Thank you!

Also, I'd like to say thank you to Elishia Dvorak, Kishore Balakrishnan, the rest of the folks at Adobe, and everyone on the Content Advisory team that helped get all of the videos and other content together.  This was a pretty massive undertaking (I may post a recap later) but one that is very much needed by the ColdFusion Community.

See you in Vegas, and happy coding. :)
-nolan