This project from a “design company” was outsourced to a “web company” that also outsourced it to me. She said it’s a wordpress real estate website and gave me the list of plugins I could use, since I’ve been working with real estate projects for years – we are using our own idx system, btw – , I said yes for a wordpress theme integration fee. When she gave me the psd files, I realized it wasn’t going to be easy as just integrating the design mock-up to wordpress.
The mock-up the design company did calls for a customized system, we all know that there’s no one-plugin-fits-all in wordpress. What I did was customize some plugins so it will look the same as the mock-up and explained some plugin incompatibility with the design company; he said “whatever it takes, just make it work”. So I did everything to make it work, and it left me with one problem, the map of all listings won’t work because it’s incompatible with the other real estate plugin which we need for the detailed listing page because his mock-up calls for that specific plugin.
What I did was explained to the web company that there’s nothing I could do (I am not a php programmer) and the plugin hasn’t been updated in a year. I told her that if it really needs to have the map of all listings work, she should get a php programmer to make a bunch of php codes to call all the longtitude and latitude from the database and show up on the front end.
The last message I received was if we didn’t make it work by Monday, the design company will not pay us.
What? They wouldn’t pay at least half of the fee?
It’s not even our fault that he designed this website that needed a lot of plugins in a page, which means 3-6 javascript running at the same time! What he should have done is hired someone to do the templating and another one to build a system specifically for his design. Or he should’ve checked other wordpress ran real estate, which uses free plugins before designing!