[consulting] Cleaning Up After Bad Developers

[Brian Vuyk]

I've had a few jobs where the original developer has been somewhat 
clueless about Drupal.

I had one job where several bits of functionality that should have been 
implemented as modules were sitting in the theme's template.php. I've 
rewritten 'modules' that a client had written which were not written 
using the Drupal API at all. They were separate php files in the root 
directory. When I first saw them, I assumed that the original dev was 
doing something with bootstrapping Drupal.... no such luck!

For better or for worse, there is no minimum level of competence 
required to call yourself a 'Drupal consultant' or 'Drupal developer'. 
Unfortunately, as long as you write stuff which works, no matter in how 
haphazard a way, most client swill never be able to tell the difference 
- only devs further down the line who have to clean up your mess.

So there is a bit of a 'buyer beware' for clients when choosing a 
developer. Unfortunately, there is not much we can do about it. It would 
be unprofessional in most circumstances to criticize another developer.. 
and beside - I am sure most of us do *something* the wrong way. 
Otherwise Drupal wouldn't be the constant learning experience it is.

I kind of would like to see some kind of accreditation made available 
through the Drupal Association which hopefully will be able to indicate 
that a specific dev has some competence, and perhaps help the customers 
out there avoid some of these other types of 'Drupal developers'.

Let the flames begin!

Brian



Fred Jones wrote:
> Was hired as a consultant to fix up a Drupal/CiviCRM site with some
> problems. Not surprising that it had problems because it was Drupal
> 5.1 (yep 5.1) and had no user #0 nor #1. That explained why anonymous
> posts didn't appear. LOL.
>
> All of the modules were also never updated beyond the first upload,
> circa Drupal 5.1.
>
> I guess there are those who "dabble" in Drupal, eh? :)
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