This is related to my employers’ websites, so the names have been changed to protect me from getting fired. Over the past few weeks, I have noticed that in the backend admin interface, which I believe is the developers’ own bespoke CMS that newly uploaded images are not being dynamically resized. Initially, I didn’t think much of it, sure it looks terrible with 1024x683px photos being displayed full-size instead of the thumbnail size of 200x133px in the backend, but recently, it became a big issue when we noticed that images are being displayed at full-size on the frontend, breaking the website template.
I have had issues with this web development company from the first time I worked with them, several years ago now. When I am told that something is not possible when I know it is possible, being a web developer myself, that pisses me off. The bottom line is that most companies that use their web development services don’t have someone like me on staff, someone who can call them out on their bullshit, with owners, CEO’s and other top honchos simply believing what they say.
My most recent experience was the most egregious, trying to push the blame on the user, that being me in this case. Claiming that the reason why the resize script was not working is that I was uploading 96dpi images and not 72dpi, which I immediately called bullshit on. Even my good friend James saw through it immediately and he is not a web developer. DPI or Dots Per Inch is a standard for printing, the more DPI, the higher quality the print, in online use, DPI means nothing, all that matters is the number of pixels.
I proved this fact, by specially creating a 72dpi photo, and uploading it to the server, and guess what? Yup, that’s right, it did the same thing, completely failing to resize the image server-side.
Moving onto today, after waiting a week for a response, we hear that the current CMS our website was based upon five years ago has reached EOL (end of life), and support will end on December 31, 2020, and that active development had stopped more than two years ago, which is news to us. This means that the issue with resizing of images will not be fixed, resulting in me not being able to upload new photos for our properties or add new properties as the image resizing problem also affects this.
So, we are left with the option of shelling out even more cash to ‘upgrade’ to their new WordPress-based platform, stating the following “the image upload feature is broken because of the fundamental way the code processes images. That cannot be fixed.” I call bullshit once again, one simple fix would be to add width and height values to the CSS on the class for the image on the property list. Yes, the image will still be loaded as full-size and may take a little longer to load, but it will be displayed correctly on the frontend. Also, I think they are trying to excuse their sloppy coding using the EOL messaging.
The other option is to bring the development of websites in house, we already have a server, which I use to develop and host community websites, but that is a massive undertaking for me to single handledly build a whole website with backend functionality for employee management, availability and reporting.
So they have us over a barrel, leaving us with one realistic option, we cannot continue to use the end of life CMS which is broken, and the devs are not willing to fix it, while charging us to host a broken website.
