Online Magazine Tech Stack
Hi Guys,
We are helping a very well established (several years) print and online magazine rebuild their website.
They are an extremely content heavy site with years worth of magazine pdfs, some films, blog posts etc.
They currently sell subscriptions/one time purchases to printed content as well as access to the online content.
While there is this sales/e-commerce aspect to this site, there is also the fact that it will be a platform to consume large amounts content. Some feature requirements include:
- Categorization, tagging, filtering, searching (Google-esque). Lack of a robust search tool on their current website is a BIG problem.
- In-browser magazine reader (currently, they are emailing download links to the magazine pdf)
- Bundling, sale/discounts on specific products, sale/discount on subscriptions, seasonal sales and promo codes
- RSVP to events
- Academic (and other institutional) access to the content platform with custom subscription models and plans
- Use of website real estate to show ads for increased revenue
In some sense, this is similar to what magazines like Vogue, National Geographic or The Economist provide (i.e. online commerce/selling of maagzines and subscriptions + a web app to read/consume the magazine itself)
We are unsure of whether to use a traditional e-commerce platform such as Magento or Shopify (as there is a commerce element to the site) or to use a custom web framework such as Rails, Django or Express/Node to build this out.
We are also looking into a Django based ecommerce platform called Saleor https://getsaleor.com/ - Does anyone here have experience with it/feedback?
Their current website is built on Joomla and they feel very 'boxed in' in terms of ability to develop/time to deploy new features/changes.
I don't recommend going with WordPress or Joomla. Rather develop a custom system where you won't rely on code written by many other developers (in WP and Joomla it's too common for plugins and extensions to stop working). A custom system may take slightly longer to develop and cost a bit more to host but you will know exactly what's going on (in the code and on server). You will also be able to deploy new feature quicker depending on how many people are in your team.
I would use Ruby (Rails) or Python (Flask) to write the code and MySQL as the database (and maybe add read only caching too). I think that these technologies are easy to code in and will also use less resources and be easy to scale. Ideally, you would want to write a REST/GraphQL web service (API) and then connect to it in a separate front end project using Javascript (I like Vue.js and Nuxt.js but there are others too such as Angular).
As people call me The WordPress Guy, I would suggest considering going into WordPress Ecosystem, Thee Frontend could be in any language, if its high traffic and you want faster load time with budget to develop, I would suggest using WordPress REST API, and use React or VueJS type or any framework, all e-commerce, or file management system, WordPress has the largest ecosystem and community to address any features you might require! You Writer or editor could enjoy the beauty of Content Manageeement systeem in WordPreess.