Hi, total Kirby newbie here, we are having a website designed for us and unfortunately we chose the wrong designers who at the moment seem to be walking away from a half-finished job. Our new site is hosted on Kirby, and we do have access to make minor edits etc, but there are some fundamentals which do not work correctly and yet we are told will need more payment to put right. The squabbles are getting very tiresome! What I would very much like to know is if we find someone else, with Kirby ability and skill, can we get them to finish the job, or is is possible for our designers to ‘lock us out’ of the ability to adjust the fundamentals to make things work properly.
Any advice would be awesome (and any New Zealand provider would also be good). Thanks guys.
It’s a bit difficult to give advice here, as we don’t know the contractual details between you and the designers.
If you have access to the server where your Kirby project is hosted, another developer/designer can download the source files and continue with the work.
If you don’t have access to the code, you have to get these files from the current designers first.
Thank you for your reply. Sorry, though, I am still a bit confused from your message. What you seem to be saying is that they can lock us out? We have access to do minor amendments to our website, but from what you say, if our designers are hosting our website on their own server then they can withhold access from us? Is it likely that they would host on their own server, or would they host on the cloud and then release access to us? Should we have established all this at the time we engaged them?
If they have not supplied you with SFTP details or a way to get into the control panel for the hosting, so that you are able to get at the actual files on the server to download a copy of them, then yes, they are able to lock you out. An admin user in the Kirby panel is able to change the passwords of other users or even delete the user, preventing you from being able to login to the site again. If they have such an account on your site, then, yes, im afraid they will be able to lock you out if they wished.
If you want to change developers/designers, they usually would have to hand these files over to you, unless your contract with them says something else, or there are other legal grounds why they should do this.
But this is nothing to do with Kirby and we as support team cannot help you with this, but you will need a lawyer to get access to the files.