Rants

What CVS does to (some) designers

There’s been a lot of talk lately about how Drupal designers shouldn’t have to learn CVS. Nothing new to see here, really — just the same tired, self-fulfilling arguments about how much CVS sucks, how developers also hate using it, and how designers shouldn’t be expected to learn something so… technical.

Recently, one of our clients wanted to install a stock ticker on her company’s website. It was a simple request; the only difficulty lay in finding a data feed of stock prices. After several hours of research, we found StockApplets.com, an online purveyor of Java-based stock ticker functions. We plunked down $50 and purchased an applet. Unfortunately, it didn’t work. Why? Because StockApplets.com doesn’t provide a data feed. We requested a refund.