Last Updated on December 12, 2024 by Neil Murray

Table of Contents #

• NM gets into the coding
• Developer Hours
• Limited Developer Hours
• Failed again – WordPress Developer

NM gets into the coding #

Planned Initiatives

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Developer Hours #

New Staff Member

I previously estimated we needed to do 20-30 hours per week of development to complete the development tasks we need to do to get CF7 Skins moving forward at a suitable pace.

With the addition of Alip to the team this has been shown to be correct.

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Developer Costs

These extra developer hours need to be paid for. Up until now I’ve never had any problems paying for this development work from the money I earn from my Engineering work.

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CF7 Skins Sales

CF7 Skins Sales has never contributed much to paying for CF7 Skins development costs.

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Senior Developer #

• React experience
• React tasks
• Automated Testing
• Form API
• Release 3.0

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Limited Developer Hours #

The single biggest problem at CF7 Skins (at this stage) is lack of developer hours.

Sastra working 8 – 12 hours per week, seriously constrains us from doing what we need to do at CF7 Skins.

I estimate we need to do 20-30 hours per week of development to complete the development tasks we need to do including:

• make CF7 Skins Pro/Extra no longer required (happening but slowly)
• improve Settings
• hide LIST-OL & LIST-LI
• more Add-ons
• Opt-in plugin
• CF7 Skins Mail
• new Templates & Styles
• CF7 Skins Block based on Form API

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Previous bottlenecks removed

In the past year we’ve dealt with the following previous constraints:

• Review & Release
• Website
• Testing
• Documentation

Each of these items has been a bottle-neck in the past & in truth extra development hours would not have got out more plugin releases.

However, I think we are now at a point where we could now keep up in these areas with an increased amount of development.

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Development hour options

Options for increased development hours:

• New staff
• Existing staff
• NM gets into the coding

For example if Sastra magically doubled the hours he worked each week, we could effectively complete many of the items on our development tasks list. Keeping up would be challenging, but with focus we could do it.

Alternatively if Sastra stays at around 12 hours per week & we can’t get a suitable developer to give us significantly more hours, then putting CF7 Skins in maintenance mode is really the most viable option.

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Key development tasks on hold

If we can’t get to 20-30 hours per week of development each week, it does not make sense to start work on the following key development tasks:

• CF7 Skins Mail
• More Add-ons
• New Templates & Styles
• CF7 Skins Block based on Form API

Without these extra hours, it takes far too long to make the signifcant progress in CF7 Skins we need to get rapid growth & the improvement in sales that brings.

CF7 Skins needs to grow to 100,000+ active installs to be successful & sustainable.

CF7 Skins Block based on Form API

In particular we can not tackle the CF7 Skins Block based on Form API task without significantly more developer hours each week.

Tackling this task, over the next 1 – 3 years, could bring significantly increased downloads & sales.

By contrast, not doing this will likely lead to declining sales, with sales going to other plugins that do make this significant change during this time.

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Maintenance Mode

If the extra developer hours are not available, we should put CF7 Skins in maintenance mode until these extra development hours are available.

Ongoing maintenance mode requires roughly the following hours:

• Neil – 2 – 8 hours
• Sastra – 0 – 2 2 – 8 hours
• Parth – 4 – 12 hours
• Ajith – 1 – 2 hours

In maintenance mode we would do only the work required to:

• support customers
• fix errors in existing CF7 Skins code
• fix errors due to changes in WordPress & CF7
• maintain our websites & documentation

NOTE: This means stopping all work on improving CF7 Skins.

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Monitor Sales

I think the following recent changes provide an opportune time to assess sales of CF7 Skins over the next 6 – 12 months:

• Logic 2.0 released
• the website now working ok
• changes to pricing based on CF7 Skins Pro/Extra being no longer required,

At this point we might consider moving to basing staff hours on the money available from sales.

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Continuing Work

I would like to continue work on the following development tasks, as I think they could bring significantly increased sales:

• Improve Settings
• Opt-in plugin
• Hide LIST-OL & LIST-LI

Work on these items will need ongoing investment (over a limited period) to try to generate improved sales.

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Failed again – WordPress Developer #

It looks like we’ve failed again in trying to bring on an extra WordPress Developer.

In this case I think we both put in the time & effort required to give Parth a good chance of succeeding.

I measured my hours supporting Parth & found the actual hours required were unsustainable. It’s just not viable to use him as a Developer if he needs this level of support.

I felt the support you offered Parth was clear & very helpful.

While I don’t have any measurement of specific time spent by you guiding Parth, I did feel that less of your work was being completed while you were doing this.

I think it became clear today that Parth just did not have the skill required to complete this task.

You would need to tell him exactly how to do the task & that would take twice as long as you just doing the work to complete the task. So stopping his work at this point is the right answer. Continuing training Parth on this task would have very questionable value.

I carefully selected the tasks given to Parth in this case.

They are all very simple & had suitable examples in our existing code that could be copied. I don’t think there were any easier options available & completing easier tasks would have had very little value (he would not have learned much).

Parth worked hard on these tasks & was very keen to succeed with them.

He wanted & sought much more guidance from both you & I. I always refused detailed help when he asked & instead pointed him to either existing code or our documentation.

In this case I can’t see any value in him successfully doing a task, where he is told how to do it step by step. He needs to be able to think for himself & work out how to tackle the task using our existing code & documentation.

When he completes the task, he can use this experience to tackle the next task we allocate. In time we would expect him to tackle increasingly complex tasks.

I don’t expect his committed code to be perfect & I’m OK with you or I our correcting it to improve it & fix his errors. This happened on some of the simpler tasks & worked reasonably well.

However on both #216 & 217 the code committed was very badly written with masses of repetition. IMO, no suitable WP Developer would commit code with that much duplication. I think, with the value of hindsight, it was already evident, at this point, that he did not have the basic coding skills required to complete these tasks.

At this point we chose to continue giving Parth detailed advice on how to complete the tasks. It’s now clear that approach did not work. I think we did need to try this but the result was more time & effort by you & I for no benefit.

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