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Your advice on PHP Website programming

by Valli
12 replies
Hey.

What do you think?

A client wants me to fix his onpage SEO. But he says that he can not grant me access neither to his CMS, nor to his server.

Instead he provided me with a copy of all his site's PHP files.

My knowledge in PHP is quite limited. I am unsure, if i may spend too much time trying to figure things out, that could be fixed very easily through his CMS.

What would you do? Should i demand access to his CMS/server, or should i fight it out and spend a lot of time deepening my coding knowledge?

Best wishes
V.
#advice #php #programming #website
  • Profile picture of the author ram07
    As a coder it will be a best chance to digg the CMS coding style and the structure they built. You can debug various classes and build in functions they used which you never came across.

    The time you spend with that will help you to improve your PHP knowledge and it might help you in future as well.

    But as for the time concern, it will be a fighting task.

    Good luck for your project....
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  • Profile picture of the author Brandon Tanner
    Originally Posted by Valli View Post

    What would you do?
    V.
    My advice would be to not waste your time with people like this. If he doesn't trust you enough to give you access to do what you need to do, then politely end the relationship and move on. Trust me... clients like this are usually far more trouble than they're worth in the long run.
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    • Profile picture of the author James90210
      Originally Posted by Brandon Tanner View Post

      My advice would be to not waste your time with people like this. If he doesn't trust you enough to give you access to do what you need to do, then politely end the relationship and move on. Trust me... clients like this are usually far more trouble than they're worth in the long run.
      I totally agree, if they don't want you to change the live site, get them to provide a test environment so you can prove your changes work. Otherwise you are working in the dark, it will take a lot longer to do otherwise.
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  • Profile picture of the author Valli
    Thanks ram and Brandon for your assessments!

    I will give myself a week. Should i run into too many problems because of my lack of coding skills, i might confront the client and/or outsource the coding of my optimization plan - in which case i might come back to this thread.

    This is a very important client for me since there could be several, more lucrative follow ups... so i will give it my best!

    Thanks again,
    Valli
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    • Profile picture of the author Brandon Tanner
      Originally Posted by Valli View Post

      Thanks ram and Brandon for your assessments!

      I will give myself a week. Should i run into too many problems because of my lack of coding skills, i might confront the client and/or outsource the coding of my optimization plan - in which case i might come back to this thread.

      This is a very important client for me since there could be several, more lucrative follow ups... so i will give it my best!

      Thanks again,
      Valli
      PHP is not a hard language to learn, but you're not going to do it in a week (at least not at the level to where you should be trusted with a paying client's PHP files)!

      Just sayin'
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  • Profile picture of the author Valli
    Yeah, you are right - PHP is easy. One week would not be enough to learn from scratch, though...

    Well, luckily i know the basics. Let's see...
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    • Profile picture of the author eminc
      Originally Posted by Valli View Post

      Yeah, you are right - PHP is easy. One week would not be enough to learn from scratch, though...

      Well, luckily i know the basics. Let's see...
      I think if you know the basics of programming, you can already find what you need in order to get to that CMS system. If that's a popular one, you will find all the help you need, Google's always there for us .

      What I assess is, tweaking a production environment is hard to digest for most of the clients. They are often worried about their working copy, and that's fair enough.

      My suggestion would be to ask the client for a exact replica, a development environment where you can run your tests. This way, you do whatever changes you require, and give a proof to your client that its not going to affect the production environment.


      Mohit
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  • Profile picture of the author Extensity
    Your going about this the wrong way.

    What you need is a copy of the php files + a backup of the database.

    Then setup the CMS on your own server. Making sure to edit the config.php so the path directorys and db details are correct.

    Make the changes using the CMS admin panel. Then export the files + db.
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  • Profile picture of the author lambcrazy
    according what i heard.. . php is not good enough . As ,it has less future scope and you get less pay if you work in php . These things that i said is for the web development and not for the SEO .,
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  • Profile picture of the author gclass
    Valli,
    the last time I heard about a similar case like this was when the "client" actually wanted to compare the files before and after the SEO work for some reason..

    as an SEO guy, you can hurt your client site's rank as well as improve it, so if the client can't trust you while visiting his CMS admin panel how can he trust you to do a good job??
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  • Profile picture of the author watsondavid
    PHP is more popular technology from open source and it is used by so many firm for developing their business application. It is free and that's why it is so popular. It is best product for freelancer developer because he/she should start their own business without any kind of investment.
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  • Profile picture of the author john_kennedy
    Have your client setup his site on a dev subdomain of his site. Have him duplicate everything so that nothing is shared (ie: databases, js, etc.) then you can work on it and not affect the real site. dev.mysite.com or something like that.
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