Longtime friendly-rival-of-e.politics Jason Z passes on a story that has been picked up with some glee by several lefty blogs as well: RedState.com got stuck with website technology that doesn’t quite work as planned and would like its readers to help. Jason notes:
It’s hard to tell, but it sounds like a consultant sold them a custom-built do-dad as the solution to the dearth of technical resource that makes it hard for them to run the existing software platforms. It’s easier to see how that’s going to help the consultant than RedState, but that’s their business and we wish them well of it.
Now, of course this happens to companies and organizations across the political spectrum, and some of us have made a living at times helping to clean up the resulting nasty mess. But what’s particularly funny is the partisan angle the RedState folks manage to find:
If we’d been a liberal website, we would have been able to fix the problem quickly and relatively cheaply. The online left loves Scoop. Unfortunately, there weren’t really any conservative Scoop developers out there to help us.
I often find the alignment of technology vendors by ideological affiliation a curious phenomenon, but surely it pales beside market fundamentalists grousing that they can’t buy the services they require at the price they’re willing to pay.
Ouch! RedState’s proposed solution is to have a custom piece of technology built for them, but from long experience, let me suggest that it may not work out as you plan. Think you have trouble finding a vendor NOW? Wait until you’re running on code that one company built and that ONLY one company knows how to fix. Cha-ching! As a Lefty in good standing, allow me to say, Godspeed Redstate. Good luck with that whole preventing the “nightmare” of “someone like Hillary Clinton or Barack Hussein Obama [winning] the presidency in November” thing.
– cpd
While I found this all quite hilarious, I will give them credit as they’ve decided to go with a Django solution, which is a pretty good web framework to use (though I’m partial to Rails). It would probably be easier to find Django developers than for those for a specific software package (like Drupal). Although, I’m not sure how Drupal limits them, as I’ve seen some ridiculous customizations with that.
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I don’t often resort to this, but I saw this in my feed and had to say LOL.
Add me to the list that doesn’t follow why they can’t build the site using Drupal.
And, as you mention, if they do a custom build it is going to end up costing a hell of a lot more than $25,000.