Thus the need to redesign the site from the ground up once more without the use of Ubercart but rather using the Content Construction Kit (CCK) and Views extensively. Though it will look mostly the same I am switching from using the Zen theme as a base to the Genesis theme. The redesign I am currently working on will enable a clean upgrade to Drupal 7 once it is released, unlike the existing implementation.

In retrospect it was wishful thinking that the company I work for would ever be ready or capable of implementing my plans. The Managing Director has a background in sales and managing restaurants/retail outlets and is a man I have a great deal of respect for, but his background causes him to focus solely on getting the product out to the detriment of everything else and in my whole time here I have never been able to get him to see the wisdom of organising the company operations in a more manageable fashion. If I’m ever asked in a job interview to recount a situation where I could have done better this will be it. I have no hard feelings towards him at all though because were it not for him the company would surely have failed by now, I have only regrets of what I had hoped to achieve.

I don’t know if it is my own vanity or a real difficulty but I still haven’t found someone to replace me when I leave. I wrote a list of requirements for a potential applicant which featured only two points:

1. An understanding of business practises and workflow.
2. The ability to map business practises and workflow to the accounting software.

Am I being too vague? These two things are critical for any person who might consider replacing me because everything else can be learnt. Perhaps future experiences will show me there are more items which need to be added to this list.

It’s funny that this is the first time I’ve resigned from a job where I am still in love with the company. Part of me wishes I wasn’t leaving, not only for the warm blanket of job security (because I live in constant fear of getting a good job when I return home), but also in the vain hope that perhaps given time my plans would come to fruition. Another part of me is glad I am leaving because it acknowledges the futility of trying to improve things and, honestly, there are employees I will be happy to never see again.

The other day one such staff member¹ told me something I had asked her to do was not her job, causing me to spend the next few minutes explaining to her the many ways in which it in fact was, but she illustrated to me an important work ethic she lacks – the ability to separate personal feelings from the job at hand. This particular staff member has had regular occurrences of extreme conflict with every person in the company and with me leaving the thin buffer between the rest of the staff and her is also going to disappear so I worry for what will happen to them in my absence.

I’m hopeful that great and exciting things are in my future.

¹ This is the crazy woman I’ve mentioned before that I would like to fire but the Managing Director pities her (really) so lets her stay. If he said ‘yes’ tomorrow I would still fire her on the spot, though the act wouldn’t garner as much pleasure as it once might have.

The only element of Ubercart that isn’t free is the time it will take to discover its limitations. With all its simplicity comes quite a lot of rigid inflexibility and today I have hit a point that goes to the very core of Ubercart: it lacks support for anything but discreet units for products (no decimals), lacks support for ordering by a specific unit of measure (UOM) and thus doesn’t have any kind of UOM conversion available.

I was in the planning stages of transitioning our company website to using Ubercart but now that I’ve discovered this particular weak point, using Ubercart in this case will be impossible. What is it about software that individual packages will include a single great feature but lack everything else I need? If only it were possible to take all those great features and make one super application… Why do developers tortue me so?