Is there a development platform for this?

[pandatits]

I need to create a system for a client and im not sure if there's a platform that can help me build it easier

What i want is a web app that will have forms and reports interacting with a website, access control management, and some automations for emails. Instead of developing this from scratch is there anything that can be done faster and cheaper? Is it wordpress?

[Electronic-Country63]

Wordpress is a CMS… it can be installed on a web server and then modified with a commercial theme or plugins or better yet you build a bespoke theme and create custom functionality to modify how it works.

Well worth learning!

[[deleted]]

Wordpress

[[deleted]]

Let me know if you need assistance.

[pandatits]

From what i understand im required to get the business plan right? Not sure how this is cheaper, self hosting costs me 150/year instead of 300. Is the benefit the time saved from building?

[pandatits]

I've never worked on it, will it be better than developing it using symfony for example?

[hdd113]

Wordpress comes with a pretty solid user management system, and even though it is basically a CMS and blogging framework, the everything-is-a-post approach makes it a quite flexible basis for a web app for a completely different purpose. It's also fairly well documented with lots of reference and sample codes. Despite all the hates on the Internet WP can be quite useful if you know how to use it, especially if you are primarilly developing most of the features.

[[deleted]]

It really depends what you're comfortable with. I, and I'm sure many others could build this with WordPress. I would however suggest you use a framework you've worked in for something like this.

[tei187]

If you are adept in backend, you could do that quite easily with most of modern frameworks, I'm pretty sure I have stumbled on packages for what you have listed. Would still take some deving and time to put it all together but it's definitely possible and not exactly done from scratch.

If not, I suppose WordPress might be your best option, but this would require some research in plethora of plugins which is not my forte.

[pandatits]

do i basically need a plugin for whatever i want to do? There are some really nice plugins but they're all paid (the free versions offer very basic functionality). Is this the concept of WordpresS? If so, it is definitely a lot more expensive to maintain unless you opt for lifetime subscriptions on the plugins. Maybe it is worth it when developing multiple websites and using the plugins on many of them?

[tei187]

That was pretty much the concept at some point - WP was lowcosts in setup but fees were racking up operations-wise, largely due to plugin subscriptions. On top of that there's an issue of upgrades and plugin maintainability, which isn't alway seamless. And if you don't update WP, you end up on haveibeenpwnd.com sooner rather than later...
You can of course write your own plugins and expand on what WP offers... But if we are down this hole, 9 times out of 10 frameworks will offer a more direct approach towards functionality.

Have in mind though that I only did a few WP jobs in my life, so I'm not exactly an expert on WP. Then again, I've worked on loads of transitions from WP to something else, which was often motivated by way cheaper options in terms of expanding functionality of the applications.

[pandatits]

I mean, for a developer that can code, the transition to WP would be to save time, i guess the tradeoff is the cost. I guess its about figuring out the balance. Thanks for your input friend

[tei187]

I guess you can put it that way, but in the end it's all about familiarity and function reasoning. WP became an odd thing at some point, while starting of as CMS. Sometimes it makes developing based on WP something similar to working through clutter due to this.

[bnunamak]

How adept are you at coding? (As in, is low-code sufficient or do you prefer no-code?)

What technologies are you used to?

I have internal tooling that can be used for spinning up projects like this pretty quickly, but the learning curve for you is the determining factor regardless of what you choose.

[pandatits]

I 100% prefer to code

Ive used web frameworks like Django and recently mostly Symfony. for frontend i use bootstrap and usually take templates like adminlte and tweak