[TOS] TOS speaker on issue tracker

[Joel Sherrill]

Hi,

I agree with Donald. Put yourself in the customer's shoes for a moment. The
YWCA will be getting a completely new pile of software with no
organization/vendor behind it. Being custom means you get an effectively
random set of security issues and bugs. Who but the students who wrote it
will be in a good position to support it going forward. It will likely be
missing basic features that any existing web framework or CRM already has.
It will also likely suffer from  mistakes that an existing framework has
already made and fixed or knew to avoid. Personally I wouldn't want to be
responsible for it from either side.

Going with Drupal/CivicCRM/Joomla as a foundation solves a lot of those
issues. You get a quality foundation and framework. Some features will
already be implemented or close. Your team will have to evaluate existing
add-ons, improve some (and contribute), probably write new add-ons, theming
and content. At the end, you likely have something which is a foundation
for other non-profits to build upon.

Real world web work is a combination of evaluation, integration, custom
work, theming and content. That's just to get the first version out. Then
you have to consider the maintenance of the site.

I see custom as a one-off dead end solution versus providing them with real
production solution. It may be a semester project to you but it is their
public face and will be there for a long time.

FWIW I have done a number of Drupal sites as a volunteer for friends and
RTEMS. Between them there is news, RSS feeds, calendars, photo albums, and
even a shopping site for electronic downloads. With 20+ years experience
and a Ph.D., it is an ongoing effort to keep these sites up to date and
patched. And that ignores the custom work, theming, and content that is the
real meat of the site.

--joel

On Sat, Feb 18, 2012 at 10:51 PM, Mel Chua <mel at purdue.edu> wrote:

> The project is a client-based open source application to manage
>> donations for non-profits. We use MySQL and PHP. YWCA New Hampshire
>> and Greater Manchester Big Brothers Big Sisters are the "clients".
>> Only YWCA has time this semester to meet with the students.
>>
>
> Update on this -- sounds like Mihaela has a speaker, Donald Lobo (who's
> since contacted her for logistics) from the CiviCRM community. Lobo also
> made the following note, which struck me (and I asked him for permission to
> repost it here, and he agreed.)
>
> Lobo: "I would strongly encourage you to consider using and building on an
> existing open source project rather than getting your students to develop a
> system from scratch and deploy it with a non-profit. This has quite a few
> issues with it, potentially. There are lots of things [in] drupal/civicrm
> that your students can build on and extend."
>
> My first instinct is to agree with Lobo, but I'm coming to realize that
> not all faculty feel like they can go this route with their classes... and
> I'd like to better understand why. Is there not enough time in the semester
> to go into a project? Are there certain learning objectives that really
> don't work with open source participation?
>
> Curious Mel!
>
> --Mel
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