Seeking a CI Expert for Guidance

The best solution I guess is replace your current programmer.
It's just like you need to find another doctor if you feel you are not getting well.

There is a JOB section in this forum, just in case you are willing to hire another programmer.

Mahalo, I will definitely check that Board.

Would someone who is CI knowledgeable please guide us of whether or not our site is at all usable? It was due to go 'live' before Christmas, but he said CI and MVC framework is very. very difficult. 

We started our site on 11 October, and the parts we requested to be finished first do not work yet. Does it take this normally take this long?"

Mahalo nui loa for your time and for reading.

Kind regards,
Rev Dr Cha

p.s. I will remain in the forum all day, and I am in Hawaii, USA so PST -2. Mahalo.

Hello, Dr. Cha.

I am not offering you my services, so I feel comfortable telling you that apparently your developer has not been able to meet your minimum technical expectations. You don't say what your site is, but after two months, even a beginning developer should be able to show you some results.

Neither CodeIgniter nor MVC are difficult. It's true that endless ideological arguments happen over MVC at the highest levels, but that's true of all technology and indeed of all human ventures. I'm sure you know all about the debates over how many angels could dance on the head of a pin, but that has nothing to do with ministering to the poor and comforting the afflicted. What man of God would tell a dying man that he had no words of comort to offer because the number of angels who can dance on the head of pin is still not settled? In view of that, I would not accept your developer's excuses.

CodeIgniter is an excellent PHP framework, but if you're looking for a Church Management System, there are many such systems already developed who provide robust performance. But if you want a custom solution tailor-made to your church or institution, it shouldn't take more than a week for a developer to show you a firm plan for moving forward.

Your developer may be competent technically, and the obstacles he has found may be real, but he has not managed to communicate this credibly to you. I fear you may need to cut your losses and find a different developer.

It is not for a church, but I want to thank you for all your information! He guaranteed a functional site in less than 3 months, so I assume that was normal? But now learning... from the positive statements made about CI, I think 'milking' is a good term at this point.  

We are sadden because, even though I understand most things here... our developer has utilized valuable time by trying to reinvent a better way to track payments, credits and the member listing. He said he had to create a custom designed payment method, member listing and databases to protect us; PayPal cannot be trusted.  Yes, a subscription site is what he was creating but reinventing the wheel, so to speak along with the ability to blog and interact with members.

PSD, html (still not completed) and Flow Charts (created by me) were all understood, but he focused on the payments.   We had already sent him the coding for that, but he said it was not secure?

Mahalo.

[Image: http://i205.photobucket.com/albums/bb177...dSig-2.png]

Three months at an ordinary schedule of 40 hours per week is 520 hours. That's a generous amount of time to complete a site, and certainly enough to show at least working prototypes. I'm familiar with the reinvention of the wheel phenomenon. A project at a company I once worked for kept getting redone as new technologies arose. From dBase III it went to Paradox and then to Quick Basic and finally to dot-Net until higher management killed it dead. And nothing ever worked. All the time seems to have been spent converting from one system to another.

I'm sorry to hear of your situation. All I can advise is to end your relationship with your current developer as gently as you can, and to then find someone who can implement what you've imagined.

Hey, don't work without a PHP debugger. Several free IDEs have this features built in. Two are NetBeans and CodeLobster. Without a debugger, it's like you're driving with a blindfold on -- you are going to crash!