[ale] [Job] Contracting Development Of Website Within A CMS (Drupal / Joomla)

[Jim Lynch]

I'm going to give my opinion on this.  Just an opinion from someone 
that's been dealing with these issues for a while now and am SURE it is 
a religious issue.
Andrew Grieser wrote:
> Hello everyone,
>
> This might be sort of OT since it isn't directly Linux related, but I'm sure other Ale'rs have had to deal with this. I don't have a whole lot of web experience, but I have been tasked with getting a "professional" website built for an international conference that will be hosted at Georgia Tech.
>
> Obviously, something of this scale is beyond my abilities, so my initial thought was to contract this out to be built within Drupal (or Joomla, Django, etc) so that the website could be easily administered by anyone after it has been created. Is this the normal route to go these days, or are most websites still built from scratch?
>   
First the question will be, is this an ongoing event or a one time 
shot?  If it's only a one time shot, you probably want the simplest 
solution  possible.  If this is a one off, you don't want a custom 
solution.  Most likely you'd want one of the Content Management Systems 
(CMS) like you described.    One of the most interesting I've run across 
is the Lanius CMS(http://www.laniuscms.org/).  It used to be called 
Drake but got in some sort of trouble for the name. 

I've done Drupal and Joomla and Lanius.  The documentation is not nearly 
as complete for Lanius than the other two, but it is younger and really 
quite intuitive.  The forums are not nearly as busy as the Drupal and 
Joomla forums so you've got a lot better chance of finding someone to 
help. IMHO it was the one that had adequate features and was the easiest 
to learn to use.  Drupal and Joomla have lots of features and IMHO are 
much harder to learn.

I'm leaning towards you doing the development here, if you have the 
time.  Another consideration is how long do you have to get the project 
done?
> That said, where are the best places to find someone who can do this? And what is the going rate for web developers these days?
>   
People will hate me for this 'cause it will be against our (those of us 
that make our living doing it) interests.  Elance seems to be a place 
where you can most easily get work done by offshore people and 
companies.  I have been on both sides of the equation here.  Both trying 
to find offshore help and trying to compete with offshore help.  It's a 
bit of a roll of the dice going offshore.  Sometimes you really get a 
deal and other times the work isn't quite up to snuff.  A lot of the 
current requests for work are only paying $15 an hour.   I can't say 
what those folks might expect for that.

You can probably get some of the folks on this list to bid on the 
project, but you'll have to come up with a decent statement of work.  I 
suggest you just ask for interested parties and take it off list for 
negotiations. 
> Ok, last question: On a contract job for building websites, who typically owns the copyright for the website, the developer or the contractor?
>   
If it's a CMS, then there's shared copyright.  The layout belongs to one 
or more third parties.  The person/group composing the original material 
for the site owns what s/he writes.  If a developer does nothing other 
than implement a CMS and take material from someone else, s/he has no 
rights.  If s/he adds software/content to the site to implement a 
specific feature, for instance, then s/he usually holds the copyright to 
that, but that's really determined by the contract.  I'm not a lawyer, 
but I think you can specify in a contract which party will hold 
copyright and if it's not spelled out, it'll probably depend on the 
state law in which the contract executed and should be stated in the 
contract.  Get a lawyer if this is an importatnt issue.
> Andrew
>