How many developer hours does it take to write plugins?

feature
1

Running a discourse forum and thinking of hiring a coder to customize it.

But reading here in the forum it feels like it might be an enormous undertaking. I see coders in this forum not even being able to develop an adsense plugin. So I figured I could ask you more technically gifted guys/girls what your guess on developing time is before I decide to hire someone or not.

How many hours do you think it would take a reasonably good rails dev to do these customisations:

  1. Totally redesign the members profile. A lot less clutter. Something like this: https://growthhackers.com/members/sean

  2. Make a feature in each members profile where they can pick their happiness score of 1-10 and have a graph show scores over time.

  3. Create a way to insert links to external urls between some posts in threads that get a lot of organic google traffic. But not in all threads.

  4. Code so that when a member logs into the forum he will also automatically be logged into to the main website which the forum is part of.

Are we looking at 1 month of coding or 1 year of coding?

2

It’s very different than the everyday scriptlet-php world, but not more hard per se.

It’s very new, in the sense, you can find a developer with a decade of wordpress experience, but if you need a developer to create a Discourse plugin that touch posts rendering, the api is 1 month old.

Apart from that, reading your requirements seen doable, but maybe more than a month. I guess 2 months with part time work is doable.

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