Ask HN: Should I use Wordpress to power the front end of my Rails web app?

My webapp (a loyalty app for ecommerce) is being built in Rails. Currently the marketing site/frontend is also built in rails. My partner who is a marketing expert, is suggesting that we move the frontend to wordpress since WP has a bunch of marketing plugins.

However, moving the frontend away from rails is going to require integrations between wordpress and the rails backend, which is creating a layer of complexity and management overhead.

Im interested in learning what others have done with their webapp's frontend/marketing site?

1. Is it in the same platform as your backend?

2. Did you move it to a different platform such as wordpress? What kind of challenges did you have?

EDIT: Here are some reasons that my mktg partner is suggesting wordpress for frontend:

1. Built in blogging

2. PLugins for Integration with email marketing

3. Plugins for Integration with sales-funnel and AB testing

4. Plugins for social media marketing

Generally speaking, installing and having an installation of Wordpress is pretty simple. However, my advice would be to keep things as simple as possible, especially since it seems you guys are starting out.

For the frontend, I'd recommend either just having very thin pages in your Rails stack that are fully or at least heavily cached that then ping your API, or relying on something like Jekyll to generate static pages that then do the same.

Eventually, when the project becomes larger and/if you start feeling pain points, you can abstract this frontend layer away from the stack into its own little app. You could also make it its own little Rails or Sinatra app that just serves basically HTML (again, heavily cached, since the dynamic content will come from the backend). I keep recommending keeping it in Rails or Sinatra just so you can use some goodies like layouts, easy caching infrastructure, you're already hosting rails, the asset pipeline.

As for your marketing site, I'd go for something that's hosted elsewhere, like Tumblr if you need a blog, etc. Just try to minimize the things you need to host and support yourselves.

I'd say go w/ wordpress as a subdomain of the main app, and use the Json plugin to pull in data to your existing design, you can still linkout to the blog, but the main site will be easier to design using the data from the blog. ie. blog.yourappp.com and anywhere you want on the front page you could pull in recent posts or comments using the json api.

That's what I use for my laravel apps.

There is a good amount of complexity that gets added when you try integrating rails and wordpress, as you already mentioned.

I understand the appeal of the plugins, but its usually quite easy to work around, what plugins in specific are you interested in?

i.e. Which email marketing and sales plugins are you referring to?

Social media and AB testing are easy to implement in rails or most frameworks for that matter.