# How many developer hours does it take to write plugins?

**URL:** <https://meta.discourse.org/t/how-many-developer-hours-does-it-take-to-write-plugins/42269>\
**Category:** Feature\
**Created:** [April 8, 2016, 11:09pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/how-many-developer-hours-does-it-take-to-write-plugins/42269 "2016-04-08T23:09:33Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![Sebastian1](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/f19dbf/32.png) [@Sebastian1](https://meta.discourse.org/u/Sebastian1)\
**Post date:** [April 8, 2016, 11:09pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/how-many-developer-hours-does-it-take-to-write-plugins/42269/1 "2016-04-08T23:09:33Z")

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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](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?

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Falco](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/falco/32/179432_2.png) [@Falco](https://meta.discourse.org/u/Falco)\
**Post date:** [April 8, 2016, 11:46pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/how-many-developer-hours-does-it-take-to-write-plugins/42269/2 "2016-04-08T23:46:45Z")

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> [@Sebastian1](#):
>
> But reading here in the forum it feels like it might be an enormous undertaking

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**.

 ![](https://global.discourse-cdn.com/meta/original/3X/9/3/93e95dd828ffb8f03b043e80dbd609e5d563ce3b.jpg)

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