Hello,

Approximately 3 years ago I hired a developer to develop a Drupal based website for a new business I was launching. I carefully did my research and came up with a developer who stated it would take about 4-6 months. Instead it's going on 3 years in a couple more months and he's not finished! I won't even get started on that story but it's a very frustrating story. He won't answer emails and makes promises and then will ignore questions for weeks or months. When I pressured him to get it done he more or less blew us off.

Well the good news is the website is launched and it's a very good site but he didn't finish a feature of it. Our project requested that we have forums on our website. Yet a couple months ago he told us the forums module was installed and he only had to make a couple forums on it, test them, and then they'd go live. 2 months later as i said he more or less has let us know he isn't going to finish the website.

What I need is someone to help finish this project. I believe it's a nice website but we'd be open to advice. A good developer may come across things he possibly did wrong or ways they can improve our website. We definitely need the forums finished and need them to go live. Also, there is a bug where when an article is viewed the Share of Facebook button doesn't work. We also comments enabled and we are getting a large number of spam from bots and need this to be resolved.

After these two issues are fixed/completed that completes our original project. Beyond that we want to have a developer do a project that we planned on hiring him for after the website was completed. This project was more or less to update the website (since it has been 3 years since we came up with what we have now). This includes things such as a button to view our YouTube channel, our Pinterest page, etc. We also want links added to pages where an article is viewed to email an article to a friend, Pinit to Pinterest, Share on Tumblr, and possibly to print an article. The other thing we'd like is to have a polls module setup/installed so that we can begin taking polls in articles or on our website and sharing results with our visitors. Honestly I believe all these are small items so this isn't a big project. As well we get many notices about updated security updates, modules, etc. and we'd need someone to bring all of those up to date.

Obviously this would start with finished what was begun with the forums and fixing one bug our developer never straightened out. Again since I've found out what type of developer he is (or I should say has become since he seemed great when we hired him) I'm not sure how good he did with some things behind the scenes so maybe a new developer could do some things better than he did them. The most important items would be to fix the Facebook button issue, the spam issue with comments, and get the forums launched.

Does anyone know of any good developers that would take on a project like this? Obviously since we've already spent a lot of money on a website that was never completed we don't want to put a large amount of money into this but realize still we have to pay someone to finish this for us and do the updates. We want to make sure it's someone good who will communicate, answer questions, and do a good job. Any suggestions of a good developer that would take on a task such as this?

Thanks for your help.

Comments

roshan_shah’s picture

If you had got layouts and feature set frozen, such a long variance would not happen. Adding forums in Drupal is super easy but it seems that there is also progressive elaboration.

The more developers you change, the harder to put blame on. It is usually not ideal to go with the cheapest one or someone who is jack of all. You may want to go with someone who has been around, who specializes in Drupal and can do a) Your site development. For this he may ask you lot of questions and want things frozen in scope and b) Either personally do ongoing support or recommend a company that can do it. Usually, unless you sign up a monthly retainer, there is no incentive for providing ad-hoc support for good developers. They move on to projects and they may not remember what they did few years down the road. It is always better to engage a specialist team who has Drupal Support resources.

Roshan
Drupal Development India | Gloscon
Skype:bpocanada
+1 (323) 319-3609

kyberuserid’s picture

Wonder if this has something to do with the OG Forum module which was retracted / marked unsupported in that time frame.