Drupal 7.x

I am looking for feedback on how to handle a web development team that has spent a year developing our site but has left us with an unusable, unfinished product and wasted a year of our time.

BACKGROUND
We hired a US based project manager who works with overseas talent. In February 2010 we signed an agreement which stated we would pay them 3 installments (of which we paid the first installment of several thousand dollars) at the beginning, middle, and end of the project.

The team has been communicative and cooperative but inadequate in their execution. They agreed to create a website and iPhone app for us but the website is incomplete and totally unusable. I don't mean it is finished in their eyes and I'm not happy with it. It is unfinished/incomplete.

The original completion date was May/June 2010. Promises made and promises broken over and over.

In November I finally hired a consultant through this site to help evaluate where we are. Just today the IT team allowed us to download the entire site for my consultant to evaluate. As I said at no point have they been rude or hard to deal with just haven't communicated honestly (or haven't followed through on their commitments). I kept trying to dialogue with them and they would admit they were slow and make new promises. Finally, I realized this was a useless tactic.

I'm trying to replicate some of the functionality of the old profile module in Drupal 7. Obviously, fields allows me to attach many additional fields to a user account, but how can I limit access to these fields? I need some fields to be "public" and others to be "private" based on the current viewer's access role.

Can anyone provide suggestions as to how to do this in 7?

Thanks!

hiya guys

need a bit of help on displaying the users pictures as D7 seems to have changed this

i used to be able to grab the info using

. $user_data['users_picture'] .

and that didnt work as i got the stdclass error so i changed it to as the db now has picture in its place
but nothing is showing up so looking though the database i see it has a id now for the file_managed table but i'am unsure on how to get this into my module

hi all

could some kind soul help me out here please

in my module that worked fine in D6 i had

 if (file_exists($bonus_imag) && !eregi("<-S->" . $bonus["id"] . "<-E->", $exclude))   

and got the depreciated warning so i searched around and changed the code to

if (file_exists($bonus_imag) && !preg_match('/<-S->/i' . $bonus->id . "<-E->", $exclude))  

and this gives warnings such as

Hey,

Sorry if this question is in the wrong place.
I'm interested in starting drupal and would like to know if jQuery is required for the final front end of site, more specifically does drupal add jQuery to your rendered public page?
Personally I dont like jQuery but have no problem with it being part of the backend system, however I do not want jQuery for any site functionality as I prefer MooTools NB: I also dont want to run two frameworks at once on the front end.

So, we're about as far as we can get with Drupal before we have to call in some outside help. We're producing a small travel/ accommodation website and as we're a small start-up, everything's done on a shoestring, which means we need to spend our budget far more carefully than if we had a regular flow of cash. Because we need to bring in some outside help, we've produced a specification for the module we want to have developed - only problem is, this is our first time specifying development work and we don't really know what it should include or what information a developer will need in order to get it right, on time and within budget.

If there are some developers passing by who could look over what we have and leave us some feedback, we'd really appreciate it!

This is what we have...

Drupal Module Specification

Outline