SkillDisplay - Gamification for TCCE v9

Thanks to Christina from SkillDisplay for sharing!

We have great news, MainzificRim will get an update to version 9. The adventure can be used to prepare for the TYPO3 CMS Certified Editor (TCCE) exam or to learn the basics of TYPO3 for your own interest, as part of your education or to gain new skills in your job. The update wouldn’t be possible without the TYPO3 Association and TYPO3 GmbH!

Topics covered in this post are:

• About MainzificRim

• Current state

• About the new skills and new missions

• TYPO3 budget proposals for 2019

MainzificRim is a gamification to learn the TCCE (TYPO3 CMS Certified Editor) skills by protecting the city Mainz from a dinosaur attack. It was created to provide a simple entry point to TYPO3 and encourage the onboarding of people not yet confident with TYPO3. In autumn of 2018, nine students from Germany and Austria were already able to play the first MainzificRim adventure, based on version 8, at the TYPO3 University Days (T3UD18) in Mainz. Three of eight who took the exam afterwards, managed to become TYPO3 CMS Certified Editor after 1 ½ days of gaining the skills. To get more information, you can read our recap here.

Educators and business persons were also interested in using the ready-to-use material for their lectures or internal training, so SkillDisplay decided to update the adventure to the current TYPO3 version 9 . All new missions will be publicly available for users of the SkillDisplay platform, and will be available for redistribution.

The MainzificRim adventure is adapted to the new corporate identity of SkillDisplay that came along with the user interface redesign. The updated version will be available at the end of September after a review from the TYPO3 GmbH. This step is done, to ensure a level of quality for the learning resource, as there are some new skills, that will be described below.

9 missions spread throughout five chapters are changed and have gotten an update or are a completely new creation.

Raise the alarm

Skills like Frontend and Backend, Page and Content Elements are moved to the first chapter “The Tutorial”.

Inform the very ignorant

One of the new TCCE v9 skills is the Social Media skill which comes along with the following goals:

• I know what social media platforms are.
• I know that social media specific content, such as Twitter Cards or Facebook Posts, can be used to enhance the content of a provided link to a website. 

The mission objectives involve creating a preview image and text for sharing on both Facebook and Twitter.

Inform the bots

After SEO (on-page), TYPO3 v9 now also has more possibilities to implement SEO in a technical way, where the editor should be aware of the relevance of duplicated content on websites and the consequences for search engine results. The editor knows about canonical links, robots, and XML sitemaps. This knowledge will also be part of the adventure. Therefore, learners completing the adventure will have to instruct robots to index the home page and enhance a specific title, making it SEO friendly.

Cease & desist

This mission is moved to obtain a logical structure.

Front line reports

Here, some skills were removed and some were added. A focus now is on URL redirects, where the basics and TYPO3 related redirects are concerned. A task will be to create a permanent redirect to the page created in the above step for the URL slug "/flr".

Report publication

Here, resources will be updated, the mission itself stays the same.

A matter of time

The skill Admin Panel Basics will be in this mission. Here is a little preview about how the story could look like:

“Remember the news about the private shelter? That's only supposed to go online in one hour from now! Civilians are arriving at the location and it is not yet fully operational. Thankfully the people organizing the shelter can cope with the demand at this point in time - we need to fix this immediately however.”

Spreadsheet the news

To get knowledge about CSV, learners will need to, among other things, download a CSV representation of all news entries located in the "News" system folder.

Big trouble for little Japan

The last changed mission about translating content, is adapted to the above described awareness of duplicated content.

The TYPO3 Association creates a yearly budget to support projects within the TYPO3 sector. After submitting ideas, members of the TYPO3 Association give their opinion and a decision about the budget allocation is done. You can find SkillDisplay’s budget proposal, that focuses on Access to TYPO3 / Education / Certification and a general overview about all proposals here.