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I can program and am very familiar with web technologies. For my own project https://rpgplayground.com https://rpgplayground.com, I decided to go with WordPress

I can program and am very familiar with web technologies. For my own project https://rpgplayground.com https://rpgplayground.com, I decided to go with WordPress, and I haven't regretted it for a single day. It started out as a landing page and a blog. But then I needed a forum for my users -> install BBPress and done! Was getting some spam comments and posts, so installed some anti spam plugin and captcha plugin. Seemed my users want to post their own games on my platform, so installed the BuddyPress community plugin. Wrote my own plugin to integrate my game builder with the website. I run a Discord server and wanted to notify Discord when a new game is published on my platform, so installed the Discord plugin to push posts to Discord. Plus, I can show Discord activity on my website. Wanted to send out a newsletter for user retention. Very expensive options out there, so I installed a pay-once solution to run this from a wordpress plugin (50k subs and counting). Soon I'm going to implement a marketplace where my users can sell and buy resources. And guess what, you have a WooCommerce plugin and some other one that enables this. Oh yeah, I want to do this with virtual credits, and of course there is a plugin for that. Absolutly awesome! And in the meantime, I can focus my developments on my RPG making tool. I also sometimes hire a cheap developer to implement some custom things, and it works great. Edit: plus, it's really fast to run experiments without losing development time. Just install or enable something, and if it doesn't add value, remove it again.

johnchristopher 5y ago
Did you setup a local installation to test drive plugins you want to add to your production installation ?
- koonsolo 5y ago
  Most of the time I put it straight in production :D. I'm at CET time, and so if I do it in my morning, most users never find out when something would go wrong. But I do have a custom script to create staging and test environments. Custom developments happen there. It's basically copying all files and database, do a few config changes, and you have an exact copy of production that you can play with. I looked into a proper development flow for WordPress, but it's very hard. Mainly because both data and config lives in the same spot. And you always want to work against the latest production vesion, since things might have changed there. So no local setup, only multiple hosted ones. The DevOps flow could be improved, but right now it seems to work out fine. So for custom developments, my developer works on test. Then I check it and move it to staging. There I check again if the update works fine, and do the same on production. It's a pretty good flow for a 1 person project.
  - mhitza 5y ago
    Be aware that WordPress makes it easy to breach GDPR compliance when the db is copied left and right and especially if other environments are shared with third parties (like external developers).

johnchristopher 5y ago

Did you setup a local installation to test drive plugins you want to add to your production installation ?

koonsolo 5y ago
Most of the time I put it straight in production :D. I'm at CET time, and so if I do it in my morning, most users never find out when something would go wrong. But I do have a custom script to create staging and test environments. Custom developments happen there. It's basically copying all files and database, do a few config changes, and you have an exact copy of production that you can play with. I looked into a proper development flow for WordPress, but it's very hard. Mainly because both data and config lives in the same spot. And you always want to work against the latest production vesion, since things might have changed there. So no local setup, only multiple hosted ones. The DevOps flow could be improved, but right now it seems to work out fine. So for custom developments, my developer works on test. Then I check it and move it to staging. There I check again if the update works fine, and do the same on production. It's a pretty good flow for a 1 person project.
- mhitza 5y ago
  Be aware that WordPress makes it easy to breach GDPR compliance when the db is copied left and right and especially if other environments are shared with third parties (like external developers).