Thanks for your insight. This programmer has created a quite intricate site with PHP so it is apparent that it has extensive capabilities. Most of the site work most of the time, but occasionally a major function will stop working, which would be detrimental if it were being publicly used.
This was quite a bit more complicated than anticipated and I am amazed he'd hung in there, but he can't seem to get the whole thing to work smoothly. What would you recommend I do based on the fact that this complex site has been mostly built but has constant bugs and malfunctions?
Quote:
Originally Posted by tangoforce
There is nothing wrong with PHP as a language. It's the coder who writes the code in any language that makes it look like trash.
It doesn't matter what you've heard about php if the coder isn't of a good standard, they will make php look like a very insecure language. The fact is that php is a stable language, there is a lot of support for it and if you get the right coder, you can create all sorts of wonderful things. Unfortunately as a language it also attracts a lot of wanna-be-pro coders. They manage to print "Hello world" into a page and think that they can take on all sorts of complex projects whilst learning on the job. While thats fine for personal projects, it doesn't work so well for paid projects.
I took on a project last year which went south like yours. It should have taken a couple of months and stretched into around 6 before I gave it up. Why? I only do backend PHP / mysql (I'm cr@p at page design) and the project owner assured me he'd got a complete template done. All it needed was the back end code. What he'd actually got, was one page that was done by a smart talking 15 year old. Sure, it looked great.. but the parts of the page that were supposed to do things (eg flash images) were static gifs, it needed account pages creating, report pages creating etc and he simply had one page and expected me to do the rest. Then came the list of new demands which I simply couldn't meet but kept going with because he kept promising to pay more if I could get it 'working'. I went on for months trying to get the front end working, hired in another coder to help etc.. Long story short I quit the project because the front end was simply beyond me and I was spending more time on that than I was on the PHP / Mysql that I was supposed to be doing. I never got paid for any of it either 
So, there you go.. When you pick a coder, make sure that they are of good quality and speak the language. If you don't, it'll go south like the project I told you about. I mention the language thing as we get quite a few on this forum who speak bad english yet are working on big projects and want to know simple basic stuff to make their big project 'work'. Just because they are foreign and cheap doesn't mean that their standard of coding is as good as others. |