I'm building an estimate for a potential client. I'll do some more research if I get the project, but need some ideas for now. I'm trying to figure out a good solution that won't take several months to develop but will still provide good flexibility for future enhancements.
My options I believe are:
cms+e-commerce plugin (e.g. drupal+ubercart)
e-commerce platform that is extendable (e.g. magento)
framework+e-commerce platform (e.g. ci+magento)
cms+e-commerce (e.g. wordpress+magento)
The site will be similar to etsy where users can have items that they sell with their own portfolio page. The client wants to add many custom features as well. Also, the site will serve up a lot of images and audio.
I'm concerned that using strictly a e-commerce platform will give me a lot of obstacles to overcome rather than use just a cart+framework. I know Magento is written on Zend, but while I have used Magento, I'm not very familiar with Zend and it seems to take quite a while to learn.
I have never used ubercart,wp e-commerce, or virtuemart, so I'm not sure of the limitations. The products will not need to be configurable. But we will need to store financial information. I'm thinking braintree's vault or authorize.net cim.
I'd like to do the framework+ecommerce platform route. But the client would also like a lower price option, I'm leaning towards drupal+ubercart.
Just would like some opinions from personal experience.
Thanks!
If you use drupal and ubercart in future please read the book http://www.usingdrupal.com/ Using drupal by reading its chapter of ubercart you can easily create e-commerce website after reading this book ubercart chapter within a day . There is a book which is completely wriiten on ubercart https://www.packtpub.com/drupal-e-commerce-ubercart-2x/book. These both books will be very helpful to you for ubercart.
I've just created an e-commerce store with Wordpress and using the plugin Jigoshop for the ecommerce.
We use Wordpress as our CMS for all our clients and we've also branded it via plugins so there's no mention of Wordpress, it just acts like OUR cms.
Jigoshop is very easy to incorporate, it can be used very easily straight out of the box but as our site was very bespoke we tailored a lot of it just by using CSS. Very easy to use and comes complete with everything you need.
I tried various other ecommerce plugins for WP but they were quite difficult to tailor.
All really straightforward providing you have a basic grasp of HTML, CSS and PHP.
I worked with wordpress and some free open source commerce plug-ins. This was really a pain! I ended up programming my own low scale solution. Later I also worked with ubercart and drupal. The latter was one of my most motivating experiences with drupal. I found that drupal with ubercart can do everything what i and my customer wanted. I strongly recommend drupal...but i've never worked with magento...
I think wordpress is enough because wordpress is now a biggest platform in wordpress with millions of plugins oops sorry not millions, billions of plugins you just have to find a plugin which suits to you and your site content well for e commerce i recommend e-shop 5.0 its a great plugin.
Related
Is there anything that can be built using "code" but can't be built using Wordpress or no-code platforms?
Short answer: No coding? Yes
Detailed answer:
WordPress is a CMS, the Hook Based structure of WordPress allows you to use different plugins and themes. You can manage almost all input data, processing process and output information. But here's the thing:
Using too many plugins can reduce performance, reduce security, reduce stability, and make management difficult. If you use plugins
for anything, every WordPress update and plugins will bring you to
tears :)
WordPress is very powerful, this power is not because of plugins or themes, but because developer friendly WordPress has had a great impact on its popularity. Almost anything you can do with PHP, JS, React JS, etc. can be done with WordPress. WordPress has a powerful REST API and allows developers to use it to code any language and for any device.
WordPress has been trying to become the largest Headless CMS in the world for the last few years. The Gutenberg project was implemented in this direction with REACT JS and is developing rapidly.
WordPress is becoming more and more inclined towards JS, so without programming knowledge, you will definitely have a lot of problems in the future.
Finally, the less plugins and themes you depend on, the better WordPress works. Many large companies such as Microsoft, Facebook, Mozilla Foundation, Harvard University and MIT, White house, etc. currently use WordPress, but not with dozens of plugins :)
WordPress is scalable and has the ability to integrate with scalable technologies such as K8S, ElasticSearch, GraphQL, etc.
WordPress's market share shows that there are websites in the world below 100 Alexa rank that are managed with WordPress. If you want to use WordPress on a large scale, you have to code.
does anyone know what building a WordPress commercial website actually means? Does it involve just learning PHP or other programming langs? Tried looking online, but couldn't find an answer.
WordPress is a blogging platform available under a license which allows reuse. Anyone can download the WordPress source code and use it to make a website. This may be a commercial website.
WordPress allows plugins. Many plugins are available under the same licence as WordPress itself, or similar licenses. Others can be purchased. Or you can write your own or pay someone to write them for you. These plugins can radically change the behaviour of a WordPress site. You can build all kinds of complex applications on top of WordPress.
Whether this is a good idea is another question. In my opinion, WordPress is a decent blogging platform, and the well known shop plugins are well tested and probably reasonably well behaved, but using it as a basis for bespoke complex applications is a bad idea. It certainly can be done, but the data structure tends to be weird. I speak as someone who has rebuilt from scratch a couple of applications originally based on WordPress, and both times wasted hours of my life trying to make sense of the database.
As per my opinion wordpress is not suitable for enterprise level applications, because due to lot of data it will get slow your site.
However if someone want to built commercial website on wordpress but on smaller scope, yes he/she can build on wordpress.
Building a commercial website on wordpress requires php basic knowledge and wordpress theme hiearchy and tags knowledge.
You do not need any high skill knowledge to build your commercial website.
Yes its involved learning of different fields like html, css, javascript or jquery, php, mysql.
But it depends on requirement.
If you have purchased a ready made theme and require only small changes then it will require frontend skills like html, css, jquery.
And if its need heavy customization then it will require backend skills like php or wordpress loop structure and theme structure.
I have been making plans to create a site that would contain several different sections, such as several blog feeds for reviews and articals, a forum, and also a stock site where people can sell/buy photos.
I was planning on doing this in PHP, but have recently started using wordpress and found it to be very powerful. is a site like this too "advanced" to be done in wordpress?
WordPress can be used for more than just blogs, having recently won an award for best CMS proves that!
The reviews and articles would just be posts, in different parent categories.
The forum could be implented with bbPress (http://bbpress.org) or SimplePress (http://simplepressforum.com)
The buying/selling photos could be done with a combination of either the built in WordPress gallery or a wordpress plugin such as NextGEN (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/nextgen-gallery) and a shopping cart or paypal plugin.
It would take some integration work, but it certainly is all possible with WordPress :-)
This is not the question you should be asking IMO.
The question to ask is: "Does using wordpress make creating this website easier ?"
If the pages you will be creating are related to the blog posts, then yes. For example, with Wordpress, your posts categories can be listed as sub-menu items.
But, if your pages are not related to the "main" blog, why bother using Wordpress?
You mentioned you were gonna do it in PHP but now are thinking about WordPress. I just found that funny because WordPress IS written in PHP ;). Wordpress has been used as a CMS for a while now and I think it's often a great place to start. I love WordPress but it's not the only CMS out there you should look at Drupal, Joomla, Movable Type, or one of many other Open Source or even commercial CMS'. You may also want to look at other products in the Automattic family such as WordPress MU, BuddyPress and BBPress. I would say using someone else code can save you a lot or time but not always. In certain situations writing your own CMS may be faster and better.
Hope this helps.
But, if your pages are not related to
the "main" blog, why bother using
Wordpress?
It's a well known plataform, tested and used by millions of people;
A Huge plugin ecosystem that deals with SEO, Backup, Twitter, E-commerce, you name it;
A great documentation;
A great admin interface with WYSIWYG editors already implemented;
An interesting approach to use "static pages" along with your posts, so you can have a full blown CMS application.
These are just some advantages. I don't recommend Wordpress for huge enterprise portals, but if you're not doing a complete different way of interaction (like stackoverflow, which is unique in it's way of work) for a website, I think it's a better approach then trying to code everything from scratch.
To write plugins you just use php, html and some functions aviable at plataform's core. No useless XML configuration files, no proprietary template languages inside the plataform, nothing. Write a bunch of php inside a directory, put inside "plugins" and you're done.
Here are some sites that I've done with Wordpress that are more than just blogs:
Driia's Dreams, which is blog and online store for my wife's jewelry business. (I take no responsibility for her theme.)
Barking Mad Productions, which is primarily a CMS for an event production company, with a blog.
Ludus, which tracks the games that we play each week (blog), along with information about the games themselves (CMS).
Craig's Chaos Machine, which documents everything I'm learning about Chaos Toy and Chaos Machines. (Still a work in progress.)
I work at a more traditional ad agency and I am the sole web guy here. Recently a designer here redesigned our website based on the popular blog style seen about on the internets at the moment. Design is similar to this blog: http://effektiveblog.com/
I put forward that this would be a WordPress job, due to the designed features (tag cloud, dated/categorized posts, ability to be updated, rss, etc)
However, the non-web people at my workplace are saying they don't want to "do WordPress" and are planning on out-sourcing a custom CMS for this blog-look-a-like site!
As you can imagine, this is very frustrating and back-to-front.
However, as I haven't really delved fully into WordPress enough I don't fully know what arguments to put forward in regards to advantages/disadvantages in building it with WordPress vs a custom CMS.
Any thoughts on what to suggest to non-web superiors? or links even pointing to similar discussions?
I've been in the WordPress world for a few years and my observations have been that most of the "WordPress vs. other CMS" arguments boil down to a couple things:
Ultimately, you could use WordPress for nearly any CMS task, and you could use a general CMS to build blog content
WordPress was designed primarily as a blogging platform, so that's where it really shines. Yes, it can be used for other CMS tasks, but it does blogging best and that's where you'll find the most support and robust features.
More general CMS systems will offer features designed for a variety of content (not just blog posts or static pages), but they won't offer as many features (or as easy of an experience) for the blogging component as WordPress will.
Generally I tell folks that if the focus of the site is frequently updated content that is managed in a chronological fashion (like a blog), go with WordPress. If they're looking to integrate a bunch of disparate content and blogging isn't really important, they'll probably be better served by a more general CMS.
Wordpress is great for blogs and mid size simple websites. It's "static pages" approach is really useful, because you can create hirarchies that are fully editable from admin panel. It's plugin ecosystem is very good also - from SEO to automatic backups.
When I needed to convince some people that Wordpress would be a good idea to a CMS solution (not just a blog one), I created a prototype, and said that I just needed to edit a few php files (all copied from the default template), a few administration tasks and a few plugins and I was all set.
This prototype was really simple: no design, just structure. I made it in a saturday afternoon, and I made a challenge to everyone involved if they could create the same structure I created, with a full admin interface, in less time. No one could. And it's a tested plataform, yes, it's not "all MVC based", but it works and its administration is great to use.
I don't know if you have time to do it, but since is really fast to do it, I'd rather show them instead of just saying it.
One disadvantage of Wordpress is its performance. You may need to look at some cache plugins for your installation, like WpSuperCache. And be warned that if your website, in a long run, is going to have a lot of different requirements, Wordpress may not be the ideal solution.
WordPress is definitely the world's most popular CMS. The script is in its roots more of a blog than a typical CMS. For a while now it's been modernized and it got thousands of plugins, what made it more CMS-like.
Advantages -
Easy to operate-
WordPress does not require PHP nor HTML knowledge unlinke Drupal, Joomla or Typo3. A preinstalled plugin and template function allows them to be installed very easily. All you need to do is to choose a plugin or a template and click on it to install.
It's good choice for beginners.
Community-
To have a useful support, there must be a large community of users, who will be a part of e.g. a discussion board.
Plugins-
The script has over dozen thousand of plugins available on its website. They are the reason WordPress is considered a CMS, not only a blogging script. Strong majority of the plugins is available for free.
Templates-
On the scritp's homepage you can view thousands of graphics templates, that can change your website's look. You can find there both free and paid templates. The paid ones are often more advanced as well as more interesting.
Menu management-
WordPress menu management has extended functionalities, that can be modified to include categories, pages, etc.
E-commerce is available on WordPress
At Designed to Connect, we generally use Woocommerce – an e-commerce add on to WordPress to build our e-commerce websites. As an e-commerce store, you will often find yourself updating your products, pricing, sales, coupons and more. Woocommerce is extremely effective in doing all this along with offering great reports features.
Disadvantages -
WordPress updates their software frequently-
WordPress is constantly changing and growing and it needs regular updates. This is not a big deal unless you are looking for a set-it-and-forget-it solution, in which case this might not be the solution for you as it needs periodic updates.
Customization of a theme can be costly-
If the website was built upon a theme and you decide that you want to make major changes to it, it may be time-consuming to have a programmer make changes to the layout of the theme. If you anticipate needing to make major changes to the theme, consider having a theme built from scratch to meet your needs instead.
Advantages:
Low cost to upkeep / maintain website is cheap
Easy and good with usability on back-end
Tons of plugins (which can slow your site down significantly)
Write your own functions if you know PHP.
codex.wordpress.org, the documentation is so easy
Tons of updates for security
The community, the millions of users
SEO possibilities (when compared to other famous CMS)
Can make a big corporate to small website
Disadvantages:
Not the the most optimum use of its resources (but its getting better every update)
Security (also improving)
Advantages:
Simple
Huge number of themes and plugins
SEO
Easily convert site to Ecommerce
Disadvantages
Customization
Source: Advantages and disadvantages of wordpress
I'm looking for a wordpress-like blog interface to put inside a Joomla hosted site. The admin interface of Joomla is quirky enough and hard enough to use that daily updates are infeasible.
What I am looking for is an easy-to-use posting interface that supports multiple users with different accounts/names, a tagging scheme, and easy find by date/user/tag functionality.
In particular I'm looking for a relatively easy-to-deploy, out-of-the-box solution, and would prefer not to hack rss feeds together or write too much custom code. I know there are several extensions out there but they all receive largely mixed reviews... Has anyone used any of these? Or has anyone had experience putting something like this together?
Well you could do this - have a wordpress installation. Get the users to post there and then use the RSS feed from it (or the XML RPC Blogging API) to update the Joomla installation. You will have to write the update piece once, but then all the headache is gone.
I'm not trying to be smart here, but if the admin interface of Joomla isn't working for you, aren't you doing yourself a disservice by trying to patch their UI instead of spending your time looking for a CMS that is easier to manage/a better fit for your user base?
Edit: All of the CMS's I've dealt with in ASP.NET are homegrown. However I'm looking into checking out Umbraco based on the recommendations of two well-respected friends. In the case you presented where you already have content in Joomla and a migration out to another CMS is going to be overkill, I think that vaibhav has got it right. You should look into setting up Wordpress or some other blogging engine and then simply have Joomla consume the content and display it in the Joomla site. I've not done it, but from what I remember of Joomla when I was looking at it, I believe that it would support this.
After doing a bit more research I decided to go with the open source MojoBlog. It was quite easy to install and configure and after a few stalls and hang ups that were resolved via perusal of their forums I was up and running. The edit interface is not ideal but it much better than Joomla admin, and it has multi-user-support, tag categorization, modules for viewing by tag, date, etc. Think it will suffice for my needs in the short term.
We at 'corePHP' have successfully integrated the WordPress and WordPress Multi-User blogging platforms into Joomla!. Please visit us to see what these feature-rich components have to offer you. https://www.corephp.com/wordpress/wordpress-integration-for-joomla-1.5.html
Happy Blogging,
Michael Pignataro
VP of Operations
www.corephp.com