B2B platform, Wordpress Vs Starting from scratch ?

Hey guys,

My partner & I are currently building a project targeting businesses. It will be a platform only accessible by those businesses and nothing will be public. The first page will always be the login page (just to set the record straight).

Based on this very thin information, I would like you guys advices on wether to develop the website from scratch (PHP + Bootstrap) vs using Wordpress CRM + some membership plugins. Here's the pro and cons of each side:

From Scratch in PHP:
✔︎ Total control of the platform, total understanding of the code, perfect supervision.
✔︎ Easy to update, upgrade, scale, design.
✖︎ I develop without a framework -> might take a while.
✖︎ I have no notion of security (is it that hard to protect such a platform?).

Wordpress:
✔︎ Stable platform, very secure base.
✔︎ Faster to code and implement.
✖︎ Relying on 3rd party plugins, with their own security threats?
✖︎ Not fully customizable and no overlook on database structure.
✖︎ Will pose problem if business wants to scale.

I hope that someone will be able to help me choose between those 2 choice. It seems like a 50/50 for me now, but I'm sure you guys got arguments to change my mind.

I would go with a PHP framework such as Yii or preferably Laravel over Wordpress. I think Laravel Spark might be a great investment to get you and your team started.

Wordpress updates constantly which is good, but you will be hacking it to the core to do what you want. You don't want to be at the mercy of Wordpress and plugins update breaking your site.

what kind of content are you serving to your clients? is it an app or just text/pics etc.?

nikchaing said:

what kind of content are you serving to your clients? is it an app or just text/pics etc.?

Click to expand...

It is just text. Just pure information.

cnick79 said:

I would go with a PHP framework such as Yii or preferably Laravel over Wordpress. I think Laravel Spark might be a great investment to get you and your team started.

Wordpress updates constantly which is good, but you will be hacking it to the core to do what you want. You don't want to be at the mercy of Wordpress and plugins update breaking your site.

Click to expand...

Is investing my time in learning a framework is really useful when those whole site is simple? I can see myself developing it in PHP, it will just take time. Or is it a security mater?

Static text or dynamic. Who adds/creates the text your or clients? If it's static content you are serving then no need for a database just to display a page. There's also a static CMS for Laravel if you need it . I still think you should go the Laravel route over Wordpress, but that also depends on your skills.

In the end, stick to what you know! If you have used Wordpress in 75% of your development projects then why stop? If you are used to rolling your own then go with Laravel.

cnick79 said:

Static text or dynamic. Who adds/creates the text your or clients? If it's static content you are serving then no need for a database just to display a page. There's also a static CMS for Laravel if you need it . I still think you should go the Laravel route over Wordpress, but that also depends on your skills.

In the end, stick to what you know! If you have used Wordpress in 75% of your development projects then why stop? If you are used to rolling your own then go with Laravel.

Click to expand...

It is all dynamic information exchange between businesses. Something I know I can handle in PHP & SQL, and easy to write, long to code.
I have never used wordpress to handle membership, and even less membership on both side (client/provider). If I had to choose now, I'd stick to PHP without a framework (so that I can start coding it now), but I'm just trying to weight and understand all the other options, pros and con.

TayaX said:

It is all dynamic information exchange between businesses. Something I know I can handle in PHP & SQL, and easy to write, long to code.
I have never used wordpress to handle membership, and even less membership on both side (client/provider). If I had to choose now, I'd stick to PHP without a framework (so that I can start coding it now), but I'm just trying to weight and understand all the other options, pros and con.

Click to expand...

If you are new to coding and haven’t yet determined which framework to use or are fluent in one framework but have a willingness to learn another one – well then its better to use PHP framework.

Recently I started my own pet project, and I took a look of the current tech and compared them to few years ago to 20 years ago. Not much has changed to me, it's still mindless html/js, just with a lot of sugar added And some of them just made things worse.

I have ditched php a long time ago, moved to golang and I have always hated html/js so never build any decent sites, and I thought that maybe gopherjs would distance my horror from myself, but there weren't anything that was suited for what I need/want.

Then I found webcomponent, it's still html/js but one can create reusable components totally isolated.

So the final architecture looks like this, REST API written in golang (you can use php for that), frontend using polymer/webcomponent, jwt for authentication/authorization and csfr tokens, if you are careful with where to store jwt and how to handle them the you have basically covered a lot's of security issues (no CXFR and no CSS), make sure to sanitize the input for your SQL and you are almost golden security wise.

I don't (like to) use one size fit all frameworks, and the above approach allow me to do exactly that w/o giving up too much DRY principals.