Posted by julia.byrd on June 29, 2017 at 6:26pm
Hello,
I am part of a small UC Berkeley organized research unit, and our IT person is currently out of town. We need a small update (adding an event to a list of events, formatting a short description of the event, adding an image and linking to 2 pages) for our website. Does anyone know a contractor who could do this sort of job? How much does this usually cost?
Also, are there resources on the UC campus? Any particular names you recommend?
Thank you,
Julia
Comments
You don't know how to do this yourself?
First, Drupal is a content management system. You describe things that are so simple and fundamental, you should be able to do yourself. Your consultant or IT group should be teaching you how to do these things, not doing them for you.
If it's so simple, why not do it yourself? Otherwise, you don't have the knowledge to know if it's a 2-hour task, or a series of 20-hour tasks. Have image fields and imagecache been set up property on your install, or does your IT person operate like it is 1998 and hardcode images in?
Otherwise, typical hourly Drupal consulting runs $125-175 hour. For a new client with an evident off-hours last-minute request, I'd impose a 100% fee on top of that, not that you could get me to consider doing this on an unknown system, with who knows what controls in place, for less that $1500 if that.
Your lack of planning ...
~kwt
Miss your morning coffee,
Miss your morning coffee, brah? Absolutely nothing of what you said is either helpful or necessary...
That's your opinion, I've
That's your opinion, I've stated mine. I suspect mine is taken more seriously than yours, here at Cal and elsewhere.
The OP has essentially asked their admin assistant to type a document for them instead of using a word processor. Common enough, but in 2017, with Cal in budgetary crisis? Ridiculous, and indicative of attitudes which have become all-to-pervasive at Cal.
The OP needs to understand their deficiencies and plan for this kind of situation, as well as engage in some technological education, not drop their lack of planning and understanding onto others to "just do it," at public expense to Cal and the taxpayer.
We are in a budgetary crisis. The lack of the most basic financial controls at Cal for the past several decades, and an absolutely lax attitude towards unnecessary spending, is the reason. No one here, should be proposing spending funds for something like this.
The request is for basic changes that any person or group at this University should be able to figure out how to do for themselves, not drop onto a so-called "IT person." Not doing so displays a lack of fundamental, basic understanding. So neither, should anyone be asking their "IT person" to do this for them.
Anyone who is part of an organized research unit at this university, should have the intellectual curiosity and tenacity to figure this out, and figure out why the above request is inappropriate.
That anyone outside this university could be casually paid to do such basic work, under the general situation described, is absolutely unacceptable in our current situation.
And "brah?" "Whoa." Are you an employee of this University? I'm certainly not your "brah."
~kwt
Hope we can help
Hi Julia,
Molly Duggan Associates can help. We have an OnDemand Drupal Support service that you can subscribe to. Many units and schools at UC Berkeley subscribe to it currently. Use https://calendly.com/erikcochran to schedule time to discuss your project with me.
Erik
Director of Technology and Trainer at Molly Duggan Associates
Design, Build and Train for small business to enterprise/global brands.
UC Berkeley Drupal development
Hi Julia!
We specialize in Drupal and are already a Berkeley vendor. Here are some of the sites we've designed and built at UCB: College of Natural Resources, Economics, Population Sciences
If interested in having somebody else make sure that your site is as secure as possible, we also handle the weekly Drupal security updates for several departments.
Also here's some more about our Drupal experience on our website if you're interested: Drupal development
-Scott
There's also a Drupal / IT group on campus
There's also a Drupal support group on Campus, run by Quinn Dombrowski last I knew, with a mailing list and regular support / training meetings during semesters. I don't have the information at hand, but suggest it strongly.
~kwt
I'm actually not running that
I'm actually not running that anymore, unfortunately, due to job/budgetary changes. The D-Lab (http://dlab.berkeley.edu) may have someone who can do Drupal consulting, though, if you send in a consulting request.
D-Lab
We actually built the D-Lab site too :P
If you want to do it yourself
Julia,
What you describe sounds like something straight-forward that someone in your dept can probably take on with some pointers. Though there's some learning curve, learning how to add content like this will empower your research unit.
Your site may have the internal help system enabled (look for "Help" in the menu when logged into the admin interface). This help system is a good starting place. If the Help module isn't enabled, anyone with admin access to your site can enable it.
If you want to seek further support to attempt this edit yourself, you can get online and do a "live chat" with the Drupal community on IRC.
There's more info on getting help here: https://www.drupal.org/support
Kent
Two ways
There are always 2 ways to do any thing the easy way and the proper way. Easy way would be to do it your self while hopping you dont get any other thing out of order. This might save you the money but will cost you time and alot of it if you have no idea about durpal. The proper way would be to get professional help. For a professional this should not take more than 15 mins. So yeah look for professional help.
There should be one thing in your life for which you can say that i have given my 100% to it.