Requesting New Features or Changes to Features
Site Administrators can request new features or changes to existing features by filing a support request (a/k/a ticket). Go to the Help menu (not the tab) in the Search bar and click on "Support Request".
If you are not a Site Administrator, run your idea by them first. They may already know if a change is possible, or how much it would cost, or if your organization could configure the site differently to do what you want, but has decided to not do that.
Describe the new feature or change desired. We will let you know if we need additional information, or if the requested change isn't feasible.
Changes we determine are feasible and desirable are typically placed on a 'wishlist', to be implemented when we have developer time available.
You can pay for development to be done by a date certain by asking for a quote. Please do not request a quote unless you are seriously considering paying for the development. Preparing a quote takes time, sometimes a lot of time.
You can optionally ask for a rough estimate / ballpark figure / side of the barn estimate before asking for a firm quote. It's rare that a change can be made in less than 2 hours (or $600 at current rates) (see Lifecycle of a Change below if that seems "high"), so there's your baseline side of the barn starting point.
The intensity or earnestness of your belief in Santa 🎅🏽 has not been proven to affect the priority of wishlist tickets.
How long will something take?
"But this would be a "one liner" simple change that will take 5 minutes."
Lifecycle of a simple change to a large code base supporting hundreds of sites and thousands of users:
- Setup a clean testing environment (5 to 15 minutes)
- Find the right place to change the thing (5 to 30 minutes)
- Make the change. Confirm it works. (5 to 30 minutes)
- Submit it to the master code base. (3 minutes)
- Put the ticket into the testing queue with detailed and appropriate testing notes (5 to 15 minutes)
- Master code base gets updated before testing (automated)
- A different developer reviews the change and confirms it works (5 to 15 minutes).
- Maybe: The developer review notes that changing the Wangle Feature like this impacts the Dangle Feature - commence discussion/rewrite/reversion/etc. (15 minutes to hours).
Thus the truism: Nothing done properly takes 5 minutes.