[consulting] Staying Current

[Alex Urevick-Ackelsberg]

> Precisely. Alex has a good point that releasing code can lead to
> others assisting to support it, but firstly that's a big MAYBE,
> meaning maybe someone will and maybe someone won't.

On the other hand, you can guarantee nobody else will use or support your
code if you never release it.

> Secondly, for modules where you can be very reasonably certain that no
> one in the world will have any interest in, there is very little
> reason to release the code, especially when that will involved extra
> development to generalize it.

How do you know this? Seems to me that even the silliest pieces of code
we've released have been used by others. You just never know...

> I can speak for myself that I am a relative newcomer to Drupal, as in
> I never used D4. So while, Alex, you may speak harshly about people
> selling "crap" (to use your word) or "misleading clients," the truth
> may well be that developers embraced Drupal because it's a great
> platform and simply weren't aware that support for D5 would be
> dropped.

I think it's worth noting that I'm not accusing anyone on this list of
selling "crap" or purposefully misleading a client. I'm just stating a very
uncontroversial fact that there are many people who do both of these
purposefully, and many more who do the second with the best of intentions.
Technology costs money to maintain, and even if you don't know precisely how
much the cost is, you should know that it's there.

As I also stated, we too have legacy clients from when we started using
Drupal whose sites we didn't build in the way I'm advocating, and we've
migrated/fixed/rebuilt many others. My opinions are coming from my own
experience (both in this real and from my experience as a Network/Systems
Admin for a mid-sized university for 8 years), and while it's perfectly fine
if my experience doesn't track well to others', I haven't read anything here
that convinces me to discount them.

> I disagree. I think you didn't understand Sam. I think he wrote a
> simple SQL call and a simple loop to display data, as opposed to
> writing a Views plugin module. For me at least that certainly would be
> FAR easier, then learning how to write a Views plugin.

If it's really that simple, then it should be simple to upgrade. There's
something else missing from that equation.

--
Alex Urevick-Ackelsberg
ZivTech, LLC
http://zivtech.com
alex at zivtech.com
office: (267) 940-7737
cell: (215) 866-8956
skype: zivtech
aim: zivtech


On Sun, Mar 29, 2009 at 10:49 AM, Fred Jones <fredthejonester at gmail.com>
wrote:
>
> > For example, a client came to me and wanted view data in a way that
wasn't
> > right for Views.  I just added it to my custom module and it did exactly
> > what that client wanted. And it was done the Drupal way.   It took me a
> > couple of hours.   I guess I could have built a new Views module -- that
no
> > one else would have ever used -- and charged 10 times as much.
>
> Precisely. Alex has a good point that releasing code can lead to
> others assisting to support it, but firstly that's a big MAYBE,
> meaning maybe someone will and maybe someone won't.
>
> Secondly, for modules where you can be very reasonably certain that no
> one in the world will have any interest in, there is very little
> reason to release the code, especially when that will involved extra
> development to generalize it.
>
> I can speak for myself that I am a relative newcomer to Drupal, as in
> I never used D4. So while, Alex, you may speak harshly about people
> selling "crap" (to use your word) or "misleading clients," the truth
> may well be that developers embraced Drupal because it's a great
> platform and simply weren't aware that support for D5 would be
> dropped.
>
> I certainly wasn't aware of it. I would not describe myself as a
> person who sells "crap" nor intentionally misleads my clients either.
>
> > In short: you are hiding costs, not lowering them, and that doesn't help
non-profits any more than for-profits.
>
> I disagree. I think you didn't understand Sam. I think he wrote a
> simple SQL call and a simple loop to display data, as opposed to
> writing a Views plugin module. For me at least that certainly would be
> FAR easier, then learning how to write a Views plugin.
>
> Fred
> _______________________________________________
> consulting mailing list
> consulting at drupal.org
> http://lists.drupal.org/mailman/listinfo/consulting
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