My Sitecore Training Experience

Jason and I attended a Sitecore training class in Mill Valley, California April 22nd and 23rd. Jason had already built a comprehensive website for Wasatch Funds: https://secure.wasatchfunds.com/ and he said he learned a few things particularly related the Placeholder Settings. I was new to Sitecore. I did the pre-training "A very Simple Website" project and took the pre-training test - and passed. Building the simple website was valuable preparation for the class. They send you all the student training material and the instructor training material ahead of time, so I read through all of that.

The class was very well done. I really liked the way they would build a Web Control or Sublayout and apply it to sitecore, then have you basically redo the same exercise. It is differnet having to do it yourself even if the instructor just did the module. I feel like I learned all the fundamentals to build a website using Sitecore. I also have an expert in Jason that can help if I run into trouble.

After taking the training and truely understanding what Sitecore does, I believe this CMS is one of the best in class because of its flexibility, extensability, and especially the ability to edit the content by business users directly on the site. This means to me, as a developer, that I do not have to write editors and other admin tools for the content authors to manage their own sites. Big benefit and time saving during development.

All in all, it was fun, the food was good, the instructor was excellent, and we met a number of other developers preparing for Sitecore development. If you think you want to be a Sitecore developer I would encourage you to take this class. It will speed your learning and teach you the basics you need to get started.