[consulting] Cleaning Up After Bad Developers

[Fred Jones]

I also once saw something like that--where a developer sort of wrote
his own functionality in pure PHP with no Drupal API and then just
'attached' it to Drupal. Twice I saw that in fact.

> 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 disagree that it's unprofessional to criticize. If it's a small
point, then perhaps yes--like you say, many of us don't know the API
backwards and forwards BUT when a developer obviously has no idea how
to use Drupal, i.e. no updates or he writes "modules" with no API
calls etc. then I think it's simply educational to tell the client
that while it works, it was done incorrectly and for these and these
reasons, it needs to be fixed. Security being one very good reason.

> 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'.

Yeah, like Brainbench? Drupaldrench? Won't happen but it's a cute idea. :)

> Let the flames begin!

Rock on. :)