4 ms·

I cannot imagine a scenario under which this code is impossible to write, but take a few layers of bureaucracy and very few people who actually dare toy with a

I cannot imagine a scenario under which this code is impossible to write, but take a few layers of bureaucracy and very few people who actually dare toy with a fragile system, and you have all sorts of impossible-to-fix problems. I remember one programmer that worked for a fairly popular newspaper telling me it was "simply impossible" to change the color of their navbar. They were on wordpress. The news business doesn't think about their CMS that much; it's just a box for them to type into most of the time.

Mithaldu 11y ago
I can. It's really simple too. All you need to do is use a software package like wordpress and not employ any actual developers. CMS packages nowadays allow even large operations to run entirely on point-and-click configuration; but the kind of special case they're being asked for here would very likely require a programmer to actually write code. Note how the quoted person says "content-management software experts" and "configuration", not "developers" and "feature". Welcome to software in the new millenium.
- chris_wot 11y ago
  Well, that's fine but with any decision comes downsides. If you marry your critical business operations to inflexible software, or you refuse to employ even one developer (or maintain a contract with an external company) then you may find that down the track you cannot make important changes to your business. Case in point: the situation detailed in this article. My sympathy is essentially at zero level here. In this situation their privacy policy, a legal contract, guarantees they won't reveal the names of contributors even if the privacy policy changes. There is no excuse whatsoever to violate such a legal document. If they find their software cannot handle what they want to do without violating this legal contract, what this means is they cannot take the action that will violate it. Should the MT Standard take actions to wilfully violate their privacy agreement, then they open themselves to lawsuits. In some cases I wonder if a court might grant an injunction forbidding them from implementing their new policy?
- georgemcbay 11y ago
  That's a very weak definition of "impossible". Even in the situation you describe you just hire a developer for a couple of hours to fix the issue. Yes, doing this will cost you money, but it will be much, much cheaper than dealing with the inevitable shitstorm that is going to follow if they go through with this change.
coddingtonbear 11y ago
Well, in the defense of your mentioned programmer, it very well might be more complicated than it looks at first glance. Having worked for two different news organizations in my past, I've an unfortunately large amount of experience with the crufty kinds of integrations that lots of newspapers use for doing everyday things like providing classified ads, e-commerce sales, etc -- it's extremely common for varying areas of the site to be served by entirely different software stacks cleverly masked in such a way to make the branding appear continuous. In the worst of those cases I worked with years ago, your only method available for changing the "header" (not HTML header, of course) involved copying/pasting HTML with manually-inlined style declarations into a text area on the partner's website. It's probable that he or she was just simplifying things for you, and that you're just unaware of the actual underlying complexities; although changing the color on the wordpress site's navbar sounds pretty clearly trivial at first glance, the full spectrum of places to which that change would have to be manually copied might be extensive, undocumented, and tedious enough to alter that "No, that's impossible" is the go-to answer instead of spending time explaining why something sounding so trivial might actually amount to many hours of effort.

Mithaldu 11y ago

I can. It's really simple too. All you need to do is use a software package like wordpress and not employ any actual developers. CMS packages nowadays allow even large operations to run entirely on point-and-click configuration; but the kind of special case they're being asked for here would very likely require a programmer to actually write code. Note how the quoted person says "content-management software experts" and "configuration", not "developers" and "feature". Welcome to software in the new millenium.

chris_wot 11y ago
Well, that's fine but with any decision comes downsides. If you marry your critical business operations to inflexible software, or you refuse to employ even one developer (or maintain a contract with an external company) then you may find that down the track you cannot make important changes to your business. Case in point: the situation detailed in this article. My sympathy is essentially at zero level here. In this situation their privacy policy, a legal contract, guarantees they won't reveal the names of contributors even if the privacy policy changes. There is no excuse whatsoever to violate such a legal document. If they find their software cannot handle what they want to do without violating this legal contract, what this means is they cannot take the action that will violate it. Should the MT Standard take actions to wilfully violate their privacy agreement, then they open themselves to lawsuits. In some cases I wonder if a court might grant an injunction forbidding them from implementing their new policy?
georgemcbay 11y ago
That's a very weak definition of "impossible". Even in the situation you describe you just hire a developer for a couple of hours to fix the issue. Yes, doing this will cost you money, but it will be much, much cheaper than dealing with the inevitable shitstorm that is going to follow if they go through with this change.

coddingtonbear 11y ago

Well, in the defense of your mentioned programmer, it very well might be more complicated than it looks at first glance. Having worked for two different news organizations in my past, I've an unfortunately large amount of experience with the crufty kinds of integrations that lots of newspapers use for doing everyday things like providing classified ads, e-commerce sales, etc -- it's extremely common for varying areas of the site to be served by entirely different software stacks cleverly masked in such a way to make the branding appear continuous. In the worst of those cases I worked with years ago, your only method available for changing the "header" (not HTML header, of course) involved copying/pasting HTML with manually-inlined style declarations into a text area on the partner's website. It's probable that he or she was just simplifying things for you, and that you're just unaware of the actual underlying complexities; although changing the color on the wordpress site's navbar sounds pretty clearly trivial at first glance, the full spectrum of places to which that change would have to be manually copied might be extensive, undocumented, and tedious enough to alter that "No, that's impossible" is the go-to answer instead of spending time explaining why something sounding so trivial might actually amount to many hours of effort.