Marcus Stafford - Wintercorn Are you qualified? The role of certification in extending the commercial reach of Joomla!

Marcus Stafford - Wintercorn To help developers independently prove their expertise To help Joomla! become more accepted as a serious business CMS Allow developers to charge according to their skills Help Joomla! protect its brand by promoting professionalism and accountability Bring income to the Joomla! project through fees Why might we need certification?

Marcus Stafford - Wintercorn Who benefits from certification? End users - your clients and customers  They know that people working on their site actually know what they are doing Developers - everyone at this conference  They can distinguish themselves from other firms The Joomla! Project  Extra income, prestige, protects the brand  Drupal already has $7m VC funding from 2007

Marcus Stafford - Wintercorn Exam and community based Different areas of certification for developers:  Development - extensions  Design - templates  Hosting – security, backups, environment  Training – offline and online  Support – software, hardware How could it work?

Marcus Stafford - Wintercorn This will allow those who only work on one part of Joomla! to be compared with others Will allow the most experienced developers to stand out Incentive to cross specialise in other areas More competition amongst developers Competition means more developers and end users More users means greater market penetration and ultimately revenue for both OSM and developers Why different areas?

Marcus Stafford - Wintercorn Needs to be backed by OSM and the wider community for credibility Available in different skill levels and areas Must be easily updatable Presents a certification path for developers and doesn't stop at just one level Easy enough to attract semi-skilled users but hard enough to challenge professionals Anything else?

Marcus Stafford - Wintercorn Award points based on:  exam results – online / classroom  community participation – forum / site help  peer /committee review You can take more than one exam Your aggregate score determines your overall skill OSM to maintain a central repository of skills for end user verification The mechanics of it?

Marcus Stafford - Wintercorn Does any other OS company offer certification? Google* – advertising Red Hat – server software Alfresco – content management MySQL – databases Zend – PHP framework Ubuntu – Linux distribution * I know, I know. Not really an OS company but everyone knows them and they have a pretty neat certification program.

Marcus Stafford - Wintercorn Is there any money in it for Joomla!? Red Hat certification has around 40,000 members. Fees range from $349 to $3000 Alfresco charge from $1300 for 2 days right up to $14000 for training over 5 days Zend has around 5,000 engineers. Fees start at $125 Recurring annual payments from developers Exact figures are difficult to obtain but these are fairly accurate examples

Marcus Stafford - Wintercorn Google Developer Certification - Alfresco - Red Hat - Linux Professional Institute - SugarCRM - MySQL - Zend - Drupal Investment - Sources Any questions? This presentation is also available at