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

The truth of the matter is that making a rails app that covers the flexibility that Wordpress allows (including things like Yoast's seo plugin, for instance) is just infeasible in Rails. The newest update to Wordpress is also quite beautiful.

I've been building on Rails and Wordpress for a while now, and have yet to see a full featured solution to flexible content management that equals or surpasses WP. I have yet to see something that makes data transformation and api creation as easy as rails does. (These are gross overstatements, but the point is that the two tools are very different in key ways, and can be used to complement each other if those differences are respected.)

There's plenty to be said for having a good admin UI (that non-developers can easily figure out). The flexibility and depth you get out of the box is not going to be matched by anything you can do yourself in a short amount of time.

> You can rebuild ANY feature or plugin in the WP domain very easily in Rails

This is just false - there's so many well matured products in the WP ecosystem that would take way too long to quickly develop no matter what language you're using. There's a lot of plugins built specifically in mind for a marketing / brochure type website that have had years of development that you can benefit from immediately (SEO plugins, contact forms, ecommerce..)

I'm not suggesting that WP as a frontend is the way to go, but I would not throw it out with the assumption that you will be able to rebuild it easily.

I would weight the decision entirely on how much integration will need to be done and what your marketing needs are. A couple of questions I'd ask are:

1) Is there going to be someone constantly tinkering with the site to tweak SEO as much as possible?

2) Will content be frequently updated, or will the site act more as a landing page with just occasional updates?

3) Do you ever need to authenticate a user on the marketing site? (I find cross-application authentication to be one of the harder integration problems to tackle and a good reason to not use a separate CMS system)

If it's just a landing page with only occasional updates, building it out as a simple view within your existing app framework may work just fine (or heck, just some static HTML files may fit the bill).