[Closed] Drupal vs Wordpress vs ..?

Guessing the subscriber database would be MySQL backed or similar, which would give me access to the data for other purposes outside the website.

WOOP WOOP

THIS IS THE GDPR POLICE

PUT DOWN THE PERSONALLY IDENTIFIABLE INFORMATION AND STEP AWAY FROM THE DATABASE

Yeah I know about GDPR thanks.

>The video content should be streamable but not downloadable, the way that YouTube does it.

I have nothing useful to add, just the observation that stopping people from downloading video content is not really possible. It's not too hard to save youtube videos.

Edited to add: This is a fairly major project. I have a little experience in Wordpress, and would probably go about this by searching and installing Wordpress plugins until I got what I wanted, which is also how you make a website that could fall over at any minute. I don't know anything about Drupal. If you're hosting your own video content, you'll need a decent amount of server power and network bandwidth.

My experience from building a Wordpress site relatively recently is the platform appears to be increasingly monetised, as in it guides you to pay for the subscription product for advanced/commercial tools. Whilst this can be worked around you then need to pay quite a bit of attention when applying upgrades.

Probably a good idea to look around a few existing sites that have the features you need and try out what those stacks look like. I'm guessing it'll be more work to get things running in Drupal but you'll have all the data organised how you want it, whilst with Wordpress how your video content is filed and managed could end up somewhat untidy.

just the observation that stopping people from downloading video content is not really possible. It’s not too hard to save youtube videos.

No I know, but making it slightly more difficult than 'save as...' would be useful.

whilst with WordPress how your video content is filed and managed could end up somewhat untidy

This is what I'm concerned about, can you expand on that?

So many ways to answer your questions, but at the heart of it (if you went down the WP route, I have no idea about Drupal) would be the suggestion you should look at Restrict Content Pro as I think it will do much of what you want and might make it easy for you to make a decision on how to approach this project.

I'll sell you a custom WP implementation I've done, content restriction, subscription levels.. it'd get you a good head start.. you'd have to also buy the licenses of "premium" plugins I've used.

If I was doing it for myself I'd use Laravel.

Videos.. never self host.. use Vimeo and restrict access to a domain / embed only.

This is what I’m concerned about, can you expand on that?

Not really, I don't have the experience, it's an inference based on WP plugins being inclined towards 1 click installs.

Might be helpful to spend a few hours researching sites with similar features for ideas, and then a few hours sandboxing with each platform to see how you get on with them.

Good tip re vimeo - I didn't know you could restrict viewing like that.

As above, I wouldn't self host videos as it wouldn't be great to scale up easily

If it's a Drupal vs Wordpress question  then both are likely to be able to do it.   I prefer Drupal as it seems more logical to me how it works when you are getting into different content types and how they use them.  Wordpress is fantastic at standard level stuff but seems a bit 'forced' when trying to get it to handle different content types and accessing them.  It is great for building stuff by adding plugins but that isn't really what you are doing - you will be getting someone to build it rather than cobble it together out of stuff that is already out there (I imagine).

Drupal is, I believe,  more flexible in what you can do with it.  Wordpress is a bit more tied down in terms of structure but that is also one of its wins in that that restriction makes it a bit faster to get up and running as it is clearer what is going on.  The learning curve with Drupal can be steeper but once you are there you might find it easier to actually implement what you want to do.  You are more likely to have to get your hands dirty with twig/php using Drupal though.

If you are going to use external developers then there seem to be more Wordpress ones around that Drupal ones.  The Drupal ones I have used have been good though, just a bit more pricey

Whenever I have had to integrate systems like payment ones it seems like there are Wordpress options available before the Drupal ones.  That doesn't mean they are better though, just that Wordpress is a bit more popular so more stuff is developed for it.

I personally prefer Drupal but that doesn't make it a recommendation 🙂

Is it grot?

If so, just use Pornhub.

I have built a couple of Wordpress sites and if I can do it anyone can, but it's not the most intuitive platform and there's so much choice of plugins and themes it can be hard to see the wood for the trees.

Honestly... Laravel.. however if its between Drupal and WP for most reasons WP.

If you are looking to pay my offer still maybe interesting to you..

I don’t have much to add other than Drupal is used to build U.K. gov websites. And Wordpress powers Singletrack.
If you do go down the Wordpress route - assemble your plugins testing everything then do a fresh install.
If Drupal be prepared to get your hands dirty to get what you want. Though you can do lots with it.

^^^ so does WordPress. The NHS also use it (or did last time I checked) for the nhs.uk site and nhsdigital.

There’s even an official NHS theme.
One thing to consider, the development cycle with drupal is long, while Wordpress gets regular updates. Also if you’re using plugins how actively are they being developed? Will they keep pace with core updates?

That's basically what I was getting at - community support and accessibility of skills. I will be handing over the site at some point and I don't want to create a burden for the future owner.

That’s basically what I was getting at – community support and accessibility of skills. I will be handing over the site at some point and I don’t want to create a burden for the future owner.

Wordpress.

That’s basically what I was getting at – community support and accessibility of skills. I will be handing over the site at some point and I don’t want to create a burden for the future owner

Wordpress might be the solution in that case but also might not be.  One of the things to consider is how to do security upgrades some sort of vulnerability comes out.  Remember that that 'panama papers' hack was done due to a vulnerability in a wordpress module.  Drupal is painful for security upgrades but Wordpress can be equally bad if you have to add your own module that you aren't looking after.  'Who will do the upgrades' is one of the early questions I look at when doing sites now

For reference the one time I've had a site properly hacked I was only a few weeks late in patching a major Drupal vulnerability.  We are not a huge site and are not a target for any normal reason but as soon as the vulnerability came out there were bots out there automatically trying to break into sites that weren't patched and adding back doors for later.  It was a real eye opener.

JAM stack + headless CMS is the current trendy way of doing brochureware type products. Skips the theme / plugin development hell by making you build the front end more of less from scratch with the latest toolsets and having the admin portal as a hosted service that serves up the content to the front end. I've had lots of success with Gatsby (JAM stack) + netlify (hosting) + contentful (headless cms) both at large scale for work, and tiny scale for the odd website for a pal.

Given that you want quite a bit more than a CMS though, id probably do this bespoke in Ruby on Rails.

Ruby on Rails

Whilst I am actually much more comfortable writing actual code I really don't want to go bespoke, as that's a ton of actual code I'll have to write and someone will have to maintain. I'm assuming that WP skills will be more widely available than actual devs to fix whatever I've done.

Given that you want quite a bit more than a CMS though

Do I? I'm pretty ignorant of what these platforms actually offer. I was (naively) expecting that there'd be common plugins for this kind of thing, and they'd be easy to use. But you've got me thinking. Perhaps a blend of WP for the actual content and then integrate it with my own code for managing the subs etc. That I could easily do. I'd be hosting on something like AWS or IBM Cloud which is cheap as chips for basic services and the latter at least would allow for some funky integrations if need be. And I'd control it all.

I’m assuming that WP skills will be more widely available

Maybe...maybe not. Many (but not all) WP 'developers' are primarily designers who know a lil php. And that's totally fine for brochureware jobs where you adapt a theme and add some plugins together. The really good ones who are excllent coders are harder to find IME.

I’m pretty ignorant of what these platforms actually offer. I was (naively) expecting that there’d be common plugins for this kind of thing, and they’d be easy to use.

There could be...but often it's that last little bit of functionality that eludes you and then you have to modify the plugins which requires coding chops - and the quality (in terms of maintainability and extensibility) is variable.

Even if you do get a mix of plugins and theme that works great out of the box, you'll still need to stay on top of upgrading them to latest versions for security or maintainability etc. It's no longer fun when one plugin gets abandoned in an insecure state, and or upgraded plugins no longer play nicely with each other.

I've only ever inherirted WP projects. They've never been fun and have pretty much all been migrated to JAM stack sites.

Right. So I'm now leaning towards my own code as I can make it simple and reliable. The website is purely content and not offering features beyond handling content access, so once it's done it's probably going to stay done.

Is there a role for WP in terms of simply creating the pages themselves? In essence, a basic WP site but with my own 'plugin', I guess?

How does one even do presentation and content these days? Last time I did it was with HTML and CSS in early 2000s

If you're doing your own code... honestly why not Laravel?

Clean MVC code / PHP framework
User authentication check
Subscription models baked in with Cashier
Options like Nova for a fast CRUD interface or many similar
Secure, fast, stable, easy to test and seed data, set strict relationships etc...
Use tailwind or a bootstrap theme for styling

Lots of freelance dev's using it - it's nice to work in and modern and they will actually be dev's no just procedural php tweakers.

... sounds like you could be a little out your depth though if the last time you looked at css and html was 20 years ago.. so if you. want some learning get a laracast subscription.

Is there an option that doesn't use PHP?

sounds like you could be a little out your depth

Yes, but part of my professional skillset is being out of my depth and learning to swim quickly 🙂

Also - it's not me creating the content, so the authors will need to be able to simply type and somehow save it and have formatting etc applied.. which is what WordPress is good at isn't it?

Of course I have a lot to learn here but I'm trying to figure out which direction to head in.

Is there an option that doesn’t use PHP?

Django?

Don't mean to say this the wrong way but theres a lot of plates spinning to get this working in a way that wont introduce an absolute clustermuppet of technical debt... so if you think shotgun coding this is going to be a good idea then I'd strongly disagree unless you've got a month to waste.

I say this because the questions you're asking are moot points and not the real battles.. for example any modern interface would likely use a js related library like trix, tiptap, tinymce etc... it doesn't matter.. thats easy, a CRUD interface could have that up an running within the first hour of a project.

If you go down a route that isn't PHP then good luck getting an abundance of affordable dev's involved if you need to delegate.

/ speaking from a lot of experience

theres a lot of plates spinning to get this working in a way that wont introduce an absolute clustermuppet of technical debt

Spinning the plates and also sweeping up smashed crockery is my day job so yeah I'm aware of the issues here. This is why I'm asking all these questions and not just installing wordpress and starting to code!

I can comfortably deal with the architecture and design, it's actually the small stuff like presentation frameworks that I struggle with because the pace of change far outstrips the frequency at which I end up working in this area.

theres a lot of plates spinning to get this working in a way that wont introduce an absolute clustermuppet of technical debt

So nicely put and so true :).  Stuff is moving so fast now it really doesn't take long to get out of date.

Yes, but part of my professional skillset is being out of my depth and learning to swim quickly

I'm stealing that for my cv, thank you

How does one even do presentation and content these days? Last time I did it was with HTML and CSS in early 2000s

everything seems to be done abstracted by a level now.  SCSS compiled to CSS, twig compiled to PHP, everything built on frameworks built on frameworks.  2000 feels a age ago even though it isn't in real terms

You could take a look at Squarespace, it seems to do subscriptions now.  It's obviously a lot more pricey to rent but devs to keep something up to date aren't cheap.  You can't add php but you can add javascript.  The question will be whether or not it will be enough to do what you want

which is what WordPress is good at isn’t it?

It is now its got the Gutenberg editor.

I think you could get 90% of your functionality with a WordPress setup using WooCommerce and the WooCommerce Membership addon. You'd at least be able to get a proof of concept up pretty quickly. The WP and Woo infrastructure is a reasonably robust set of foundations too to start things from too, so less worry about the technical debt side of things.

https://woocommerce.com/products/woocommerce-memberships/

There's a Subscriptions addon for Woo too that may be worth a look into.

You should be scanning documentations not asking the questions IMO and especially on a bike forum... go on reddit/laravel or reddit/wordpress or even better go back to the docs; as all the answers are laid out to a digest-able level there.

You'd be hard pushed to get Squarespace to work for your needs without feeling suffocated.

I'm still not sure why you're sweating attaching a well documented JS library to replace a textarea in a form.. that still throws alarm bells.

If things like Webpack, Composer, NPM, SCSS, GIT worry you then go with Wordpress if not... and for the final time Laravel.. you'd actually end up with a worthy SASS.

Just be prepared you'll probably make a mess with wordpress as it'd be extremely hard not to with your angle.

You’d be hard pushed to get Squarespace to work for your needs without feeling suffocated.

Agreed.  It just might solve some of the maintenance issues

You should be scanning documentations not asking the questions IMO and especially on a bike forum

It's not like this is my only avenue of investigation!

I’m still not sure why you’re sweating attaching a well documented JS library to replace a textarea in a form.. that still throws alarm bells.

I'm not sweating anything, just canvassing opinions before I start. This is not my first rodeo.

And like I say, avoiding messes is literally my day job and it is my major concern here. if it weren't I'd have dived straight in. The reason I am asking here is because I know there are seasoned web devs and the questions I have are the ones not normally covered in the getting started pages of the docs.

WooCommerce looks pretty good though and it's affordable.

Woocommerce is overkill, heavy and messy and you'd be into £400/ish a year off the bat in keeping upto date plugins. However because it is so big heavy and messy there are a lot of people who work with it. It is solid too.. I've got 2 sites turning over millions a year via it without a hiccup.. however its not what I'd recommend if you want to do simple restricted content, simple membership levels and membership payments.

It's made by Automatic.. the creators of Wordpress.

Any reason you'd be adversed to Laravel... it literally ticks all the boxes if you don't think the learning curve will get in the way?

Rails is the other batteries included MVC framework, but Ruby devs harder to find than php ones

its not what I’d recommend if you want to do simple restricted content

The issue is that the content isn't 'simply' restricted, as in it's not just members or public. It's a series of products to which the users need access based on their sub. Some users will have access to certain 'series' of posts either as one-off payments or regular subs. A bit like online courses, I suppose.

I hadn't looked at Laravel yet but I'm checking now.

What about Wix?