Hi, we are a group wanting to casually blog about our areas of expertise. A couple of us have software development experience but haven’t worked with PHP or WordPress. Only enterprise, boring software!
A couple of features on the site are:
1. Allow the user to navigate to a page only if they have completed some prerequisites (like, visiting a different page, completion of sign up, ack something…)
2. Hide text within a page (like, hide bullet 4 but show the rest of the content on the page) based on the membership or status of a user. I thought we could use a custom tag within the text and parse it in the backend. But didn’t seem as simple in my wordpress sample I tried to build.
3. Custom authentication: We want a easy sign up process and want a custom method which is fairly secure. Login plugins may not suffice.
4. Comment sections need tabs based on the user’s preferences and communities. So, the comment plugins may not suffice.
Is wordpress even an option for us? Are there other tools (like Vue.js) which can help?
We aren’t planning to make money using this site, so want to keep expenses (hosting, data access costs if that becomes significant) low. No plans to have ads on the site.
Please help. Your expertise and advice are appreciated. Thanks.
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Yes. Not one of these functionalities requires anything premium. You can use paid plugins if you want but your highest expense is likely hosting. Don’t use WordPress.com.
All the core functionality you are looking for is out of the box with WordPress:
* User Permissions
* Blogging
* Authors
* Comments
Any sort of customized way you want those to function, you would have to code our yourself and get dirty with either baking these features into your theme file or creating a custom plugin. Most commercial plugins are going to fit most common use cases, but if you are trying to narrow your use case to a small target, you will have to get dirty with learning WP development.
Vue.js isn’t a comparable option to WordPress cause you are comparing a Front End framework to a full Content Management System. Two different solutions meant for different problems. If you wanted to use Vue.js for a WordPress build though, you absolutely can by going the headless WordPress route, although in my experience, most of the headless WP community tends to steer towards React solutions (NextJS).
Can’t really speak to if anything else out there would be a better solution, any project I get with a scope thats not an application driven website I usually default to WordPress because you can essentially customize anything you want in WordPress if you have the know how.
The assorted custom functionalities you describe probably mostly exist in plugins, but may need some adjustments to fit your exact needs.
Basically it’s not hard to build any of the things you said, it’s just that according to you, you don’t know how to build them. However, everything you want is possible entirely, and relatively easily, in WordPress.
As others have said, most of what you’re looking for comes built into WordPress. The membership and access management parts can be handled with any of a dozen different membership plugins.
Membership plugins offer various ways to limit content visibility, including mid-content visibility like bullet #4 in a list. Mid-content restrictions use tokens (shortcodes in WordPress parlance.)
Important note: WordPress is largely self-executing, meaning that for the most part you don’t need to know PHP or even WordPress functions to build surprisingly complex sites.
Second important note: this is *not* to say there’s no role for PHP and programming in WordPress. Ahahaha, not at all! But *when you’re getting started* it’s best to learn what WordPress can do “out of the box.” Then when you start coding you can do so without either re-inventing the wheel or overriding it.
I recommend [Framer](http://framer.com?via=artech-web)
it makes designing the site easy and it’s bundled up with its own hosting, and if your team does mind the brand badge, it’s free!
an alternative, if you don’t find a little bit of coding, would be the [Astro](http://astro.build)
follow the quick start up docs and deploy on your platform of choice. your blog articles can all be in markup and the framework is light.
Sounds like you should consider using web framework for custom functionality like using Roots Sage for WordPress but if you refer easier coding with TypeScript, Astro web framework ins interesting and much less learning curve to implement Bcrypt for login, moddleware for auth and use TinyMCE or markdown for writing. Astro is exactly made for the content driven, and trust me, it’s fun!