You're going to love to hate this: Best choice I made was using WordPress!
I run https://rpgplayground.com, a web tool to make RPG games without coding (6000+ user published games) The app itself is written in Haxe. My website is WordPress.
Haxe because it will be easy to port to any device.
Why was WordPress the best choice? Basically everything you need has a plugin.
I needed a forum: bbPress
I needed a community where my members post updates: BuddyPress
I need to send out a newsletter, and most Saas options are crazy expensive: plugin mailster.co, 1 time payment. (Using critsend.com)
Needed some faq page with search, needed a captcha for registering, experimented with ads, post updates to discord, user reporting system, ... You name it, there is a plugin for that.
I also have an external person who writes my newsletters, but isn't allowed push the "publish" button. All thanks to the user roles functionality.
Of course I needed my own plugin to integrate my app and show shared games. I could have written that myself, but then I would lose out on time developing my tool. So I was able to hire a cheap php WordPress developer who made my custom plugin. Went great!
WordPress is so crazy powerfull, that if you want to create some community website, it offers everything you need.
I know my experience is not what many of you would expect, so therefore thought it was interesting to share it with you.
Good on you. WordPress is a fantastic piece of software and I think a lot of the nose wrinkling and hemming a hawing about security comes from people installing suspect plugins.
If you stick with the core product and set a very high bar for which plugins you install, Wordpress is rock solid
Security is indeed something you need to take into consideration. Not only installing plugins, but also pulling in updates regularly (that might contain new exploits).
But you have to ask yourself the question what is most important:
1. A full featured system that is popular (because it's full featured), but might have higher risk on security.
1. A limited system that is less popular (because of the limited features), but has a high regard on security.
Anyway, I don't store personal information and have regular backups. So when the worst hits the fan, I would still be able to recover from that.
You have to ask the question how important security is relative to all the other things. Once I would have ingame currency for example, I will need to beef up my focus on security. But for now, I accept the trade-off.
> hemming a hawing about security comes from people installing suspect plugins
But plug-ins are the reason for using WP and this is often touted. Then people get criticised for using plugins? Indeed the post you’re quoting mentions lots of plugins!
I’ve only very lightly used WP over the years but /every/ plug-in seems suspect
> Of course I needed my own plugin to integrate my app and show shared games. I could have written that myself, but then I would lose out on time developing my tool. So I was able to hire a cheap php WordPress developer who made my custom plugin. Went great!
Yes, wordpress is wonderful if you don't have to write your own plugins and themes yourself. But if you do, you'd wish you were using something else though. You pay for those extensibility, backward compatibility and huge plugin ecosystem by sacrificing developer experience.
As a developer myself, I was also more than involved in developing the plugin. It's indeed true that it can be a bit messy. But I think the huge ecosystem and customization (through hooks and filters) make up for the sometimes difficult developer experience.
The developer experience is bad, even compared to other PHP-based frameworks like laravel. It may not be bad 15 years ago, but when the rest of the word has moved forward. When other frameworks compete with each other to give the best developer experience, wordpress developer experience hasn't improved (or even regressed depending on who you ask). I've been creating and maintaining several plugins and themes in the past 10 years, and these days whenever I work on them I feel dread. In contrast, I feel joy when working on django projects, dabling with phoenix/elixir, or various react-based framework.
To be honest, I don't know if wordpress can improve their developer experience without killing the golden goose.
Edit; sorry I misread your comment somehow! I will leave my response anyway. But it is not actually relevant to your comment; sorry about that. I agree with you, I guess the ‘even compared’ threw me off; laravel is pretty painless imho so maybe it does actually apply?
What is bad about laravel for development experience? I don’t like php or js or, dare I say it, ts (I don’t mind the language and like the type system but the tooling is so rotten; hope deno will fix things), so I often experiment in projects by taking something else like Phoenix, IHP or Dioxus etc and it’s nice, but you always run into the lack of help when stuck. I did a large project with a team with laravel the past months and was really surprised how productive it is; we did basically the impossible in a very short time. Mostly because plug-ins and the bizarre amount of capable people willing to help all over the place.
Still don’t like the language but it’s very productive and robust imho.
Wordpress I did quite a lot with as well but I will never like it; it is too messy to be clean and too clean to be a mess; it doesn’t fit my way of thinking either way.
I feel real joy not having to use JS for anything though; things like liveview/livewire/blazor/dioxus etc really make my life better.
Yes, I meant when compared to other framework written in the same language, the developer experience is vastly different. Developing with laravel is miles better compared to wordpress despite using the same language.
where did you find a good developer for Wordpress? there are so many that it’s hard to separate wheat from chaff. Especially when it comes to doing things with security/authorization.
As a CTO/developer who works with Ruby/Rails and hates php, I think you made the best choice! Especially as a solo who needs these types of “auxillary” functionality. Wordpress is crazy productive in this way. Their plugin ecosystem, ease of upgrades, admin interface with roles is amazing. And the extensibility using filters and hooks is insane. I sometimes wish other libraries could offer this customization abstraction, even though it’s hard to reason about hooks and filters and it’s weird to get used to. But so powerful.
> where did you find a good developer for Wordpress?
I was kind of lucky that my brother in law has a software development firm in Slovakia. So I hired one of his employees with the agreement that I would just pay for his time, and there are no deadlines. That means this developer could work on my stuff in between their other projects (which do have deadlines). This way I could get a good deal on the rate.
My fail plan was to follow him up closely, and if he didn't deliver the first week I would be able to pay for his time and don't request more work (don't want to get in arguments with family ;)). But it all went great!
For you, I would try out someone and give them a tiny thing to start with. If they can deliver, let them do more. Since you're a developer you should be able to judge their work. That way you limit the loss when it doesn't work out.
I run https://rpgplayground.com, a web tool to make RPG games without coding (6000+ user published games) The app itself is written in Haxe. My website is WordPress.
Haxe because it will be easy to port to any device.
Why was WordPress the best choice? Basically everything you need has a plugin.
I needed a forum: bbPress
I needed a community where my members post updates: BuddyPress
I need to send out a newsletter, and most Saas options are crazy expensive: plugin mailster.co, 1 time payment. (Using critsend.com)
Needed some faq page with search, needed a captcha for registering, experimented with ads, post updates to discord, user reporting system, ... You name it, there is a plugin for that.
I also have an external person who writes my newsletters, but isn't allowed push the "publish" button. All thanks to the user roles functionality.
Of course I needed my own plugin to integrate my app and show shared games. I could have written that myself, but then I would lose out on time developing my tool. So I was able to hire a cheap php WordPress developer who made my custom plugin. Went great!
WordPress is so crazy powerfull, that if you want to create some community website, it offers everything you need.
I know my experience is not what many of you would expect, so therefore thought it was interesting to share it with you.