Elvis Blogs - Elvis McNeely

It is hard to believe that 62 emails were involved in building a drupal based website for my first client. I have built drupal sites in the past but only for myself. This 1st client is a photographer in Ireland and wanted a site for his clients to login and see their images he took for them. And for the client only to see his/her images.

The second important thing was to have a public gallery that is accessible from non logged in user and for logged in users. That may seem like a easy task but when using the Tac Lite module things can get a little harry because each user and role has some form of permissions that has to be defined. And, it has to be organized and simplified for the client as well, to not be confusing when adding a new client.

The next thing was to simplify how he populates a gallery more efficiently. This took some time and testing. If he would have been a paid by hour client he would not have liked this part of the bill. Fortunately for him he paid by the project. So, in the end I went with a module called Publish Image. It had some limitations so I had to modify it a bit, in the end the client was happy. The module will upload multiple images from your PC to the site. This process is of uploading multiple images is now very efficient and flawless.

So, why 62 emails? My goal for this client and every future client is communication. I have read many times that the number 1 problem for developer and their client is the developer doesn't communicate what is going on. The client many times is left waiting for days or weeks to receive an update. At the same time, I have also read that many times the client does not know exactly what they want and this causes the developer to waste time, which is not a good thing when working on a project basis.

My goal in the 62 emails was to communicate to the client thoroughly. 62 emails and 3 weeks later, Ireland Photographer was built. For you pro developers out there, 3 weeks may seem like a lot of time but keep in mind I work 25 hours a week for this type of work. For this client the total time invested (includes research, module testing, module modification, and theme work) was 55 hours. Now, the module testing alone took some 20 hours as I tested 4 image related modules and combined some of them with other modules just to make bulk uploading of images efficient. If I new drupal core better and had more PHP experience I could have written a module of my own, in less time probably, to do the upload multiple images efficiently. Some 12 hours of theme work was involved as I had some IE issues, as usual.

I wanted to give credits to the theme design contributor for irelandphotographer.ie: Gurpartap, thanks!

My next project is for a friend at church who has some rental properties in town. I will be building an information site and doing some SEO work for him. No domain name just yet. This project should not take too much time but I will need to learn the views module I believe.