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

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

#11

Post by whalesalad »

The marketing tools you gain in WP are not worth building your product-core in WP. Anything that you get as a WP plugin is something you could build really easily as your own component in Rails.

1. built-in blogging ... everyone and their brother has built a blogging platform for Rails. WP's blogging platform is a one-size-fits-all approach which usually means you only use about 10% of what it's capable of, so having all the extra cruft is just unnecessary. You want a simple blog in Rails?

    rails g model Post author_id:integer title:string body:text
2. integration with email marketing – the plugin is only going to get you half-way there. On either platform, rails or wordpress or anything else, you still need to build the component that will take your specific business data and turn that into actionable emails. Example, email users who joined in the last 30 days who have not used our service. That is something you need to build yourself for your specific product no matter what back-end you are using.

3. Sales-funnel and AB testing – Mixpanel or Google Analytics will give you the funneling. AB testing can be done with your own solution to solve your exact problems, or check out the variety of gems that help make it easy: https://www.ruby-toolbox.com/categories/A_B_Testing

4. Social media marketing ... again throwing the idea around that you can click "install plugin" and have all your bases covered here is not very realistic. What do you mean by this? Automatically tweet or post to fb based on certain events on the app? Auto tweet/post your blog posts?

Either way, I'd argue against doing anything with Wordpress other than a static blog.yourdomain.com. You can rebuild ANY feature or plugin in the WP domain very easily in Rails.

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

#12

Post by DanHulton »

deathspin wrote: post #2

I'd put the marketing site at whatever.com and the app and app.whatever.com. You then decide what types of information needs to pass between the two systems. Instead of porting your entire frontend you simple build a few API calls and pull those in with WordPress.

Absolutely needs to be rated higher. I've done this for a few sites and it works wonderfully, not to mention having an API exposed like this gives you opportunities for integration with other people's services, if you choose to go that way.

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

#13

Post by raheemm »

whalesalad wrote: post #11

The marketing tools you gain in WP are not worth building your product-core in WP. Anything that you get as a WP plugin is something you could build really easily as your own component in Rails. 1. built-in blogging ... everyone and their brother has built a blogging platform for Rails. WP's blogging platform is a one-size-fits-all approach which usually means you only use about 10% of what it's capable of, so having…

Example, email users who joined in the last 30 days who have not used our service. That is something you need to build yourself for your specific product no matter what back-end you are using.

Exactly, that's a great example of why keeping everything in rails seems to make more sense.

EDIT: To clarify my app will remain in rails. Just trying to figure out whether my mktg site should be migrated away to wordpress.

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

#14

Post by raheemm »

DanHulton wrote: post #12
deathspin wrote: post #2

I'd put the marketing site at whatever.com and the app and app.whatever.com. You then decide what types of information needs to pass between the two systems. Instead of porting your entire frontend you simple build a few API calls and pull those in with WordPress.

Absolutely needs to be rated higher. I've done this for a few sites and it works wonderfully, not to mention having an API exposed like this gives you opportunities for integration with other people's services, if you choose to go that way.

The API exposure is a good benefit

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

#15

Post by greendata »

deathspin wrote: post #2

I'd put the marketing site at whatever.com and the app and app.whatever.com. You then decide what types of information needs to pass between the two systems. Instead of porting your entire frontend you simple build a few API calls and pull those in with WordPress.

I have found this to be the most helpful way of setting things up

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

#16

Post by somesay »

raheemm wrote: post #13
whalesalad wrote: post #11

The marketing tools you gain in WP are not worth building your product-core in WP. Anything that you get as a WP plugin is something you could build really easily as your own component in Rails. 1. built-in blogging ... everyone and their brother has built a blogging platform for Rails. WP's blogging platform is a one-size-fits-all approach which usually means you only use about 10% of what it's capable of, so having…

Example, email users who joined in the last 30 days who have not used our service. That is something you need to build yourself for your specific product no matter what back-end you are using. Exactly, that's a great example of why keeping everything in rails seems to make more sense. EDIT: To clarify my app will remain in rails. Just trying to figure out whether my mktg site should be migrated away to wordpress.

I'm still not sure what exactly your plan is. Just moving your landing/marketing page or the whole ecommerce frontend?

WordPress is nice if you need a blog or at least a CMS for luser or if you need some framework to build on. Is that the case?

Maybe it's a useful abstraction (e.g. uptime, maintenance, development) and maybe it's good that someone without developer knowledge could work on it, but you told it would need a lot of integration work? Sounds like you should create an API then. If you need an API anyway, than this actually would be a great way to test it in a real environment. Otherwise likely unneeded effort.

To speak about WordPress plugins, please mind, that most of them are rather simple. Hook some button code and JavaScript somewhere and offer some simple configuration backend UI. Deep integration for any features the user might see often needs custom CSS work, editing the site template or even coding within the plugin. At least that's my experience with my personal requirements. Or to say it in different words: Integrating Facebook buttons isn't that hard anyway, but a professional newsletter would be a lot of work anyway. Also you could likely reuse the plugin code and transform it into Rails code.

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

#17

Post by raheemm »

somesay wrote: post #16
raheemm wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Example, email users who joined in the last 30 days who have not used our service. That is something you need to build yourself for your specific product no matter what back-end you are using. Exactly, that's a great example of why keeping everything in rails seems to make more sense. EDIT: To clarify my app will remain in rails. Just trying to figure out whether my mktg site should be migrated away to wordpress.

I'm still not sure what exactly your plan is. Just moving your landing/marketing page or the whole ecommerce frontend? WordPress is nice if you need a blog or at least a CMS for luser or if you need some framework to build on. Is that the case? Maybe it's a useful abstraction (e.g. uptime, maintenance, development) and maybe it's good that someone without developer knowledge could work on it, but you told it would ne…

Im looking into moving the marketing page to wordpress. The app is most certainly not moving to wordpress. It's staying in rails.

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

#18

Post by bushido »

raheemm wrote: post #10
bushido wrote: post #9

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.

I dont have any specific plugins. But the initial thought was that instead of coding up integrations with rails for various 3rd party marketing stuff, lets just use wordpress and save ourselves time.

Wordpress is definitely easy to setup and has a ton of plugins. But in my experience when integrating it with other services/frameworks/etc. it doesn't really save on time; it's more like the time spent will gradually creep up, to the point that it may not have been the right choice to begin with.

What you should note is that most WP plugins that integrate with external services usually just insert code in the the views/themes. Also worth mentioning that there are a lot of features in WP that you will never use or need and a few features that you will integrate but may also need in your rails app(AB testing is the obvious one).

Like I mentioned earlier there are easy workaround's for most features that you would need:

1. Blogging -> I'd go static unless I was doing more than 8-10 posts a month. Other options include Jekyll, Octopress, Ghost or Rails/Sinatara.

2. AB Testing (You may want this for your rails app too) -> a gem[0], web apps[1] and see what other are doing[2][3].

3. Sales -> I am guessing this is mostly going to be lead generation forms and such, depending on what other services you use it is extremely simple to include these via html, js or iframes.

4. Social Media -> For users to share you could use something like www.sharethis.com there are a few alternatives too

5. Comments -> Disqus, take 30 secs to setup and install.

6. Permalinks -> Easy to do with config/routes.rb

[0] https://github.com/andrew/split [1] https://www.optimizely.com/ | http://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com/ [2] http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2977-behind-the-scenes-highri... [3] http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2983-behind-the-scenes-ab-tes...

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

#19

Post by raheemm »

bushido wrote: post #18
raheemm wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dont have any specific plugins. But the initial thought was that instead of coding up integrations with rails for various 3rd party marketing stuff, lets just use wordpress and save ourselves time.

Wordpress is definitely easy to setup and has a ton of plugins. But in my experience when integrating it with other services/frameworks/etc. it doesn't really save on time; it's more like the time spent will gradually creep up, to the point that it may not have been the right choice to begin with. What you should note is that most WP plugins that integrate with external services usually just insert code in the the vi…

Hey, this is v. helpful! Thanks!

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

#20

Post by Vitaly »

We actually recommend exactly this to many of our customers. Unless the marketing homepage needs a lot of dynamic app-database driven content we usually recommend installing wordpress on www.domain.com and rails app on domain.com.

when user is not logged-in, domain.com redirects to www.domain.com.

this setup saves a lot of time on static pages management and adds quite a bit of marketing power.

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