I have had a number of people write me about Thom Downing’s blog post about Couponic called – Couponic “The Bottom Layer of Programmer Hel”.
I respect that Thom even desired to post the article. There is very little on Couponic out there. I consider Thom to be very knowledgeable. I get people asking for my opinion of Couponic.
Now since I have been working with Couponic for the good part of this year and I don’t consider myself to be a Yii expert nor a PHP expert. Since I have started I have not had an issue of complexity beyond belief. I have seen people get the application up and running with very little investment on programmers to fix it. I wish I had the job that paid me $7000 to fix a site but I have not seen the need for it. I have been able to get the application up and running out of the box in less then 3 hours.
I have advised many people that have asked for my opinion that it takes more than $200 to start a business anywhere. If your business module requires you to modify the Couponic application to suit your model extensively then maybe you should look at developing a new app yourself or use Couponic as a base to start. Any coder you hire will need to understand clearly PHP’s OO concepts and know how to use a programmer grade IDE like Eclipse or NetBeans.
The programmer should learn how Yii functions as an OO framework. This application is not a 100% Yii framework application. It uses Yii as a basis but none of the Yii command line interfaces will work with it. Couponic is an extended framework from Yii. It is not perfect. Yes you can have 1o levels of override but why use them all? There is no need to use them all. Many frameworks allow for this layering it not a complex issue.
I have enjoyed programming Couponic.
If anyone has a $7000 project to just get Couponic to work please let me know. I could use the money.