Tech stack needed for a membership site
Hi,
I'm looking for a tech stack to grant access to data visualizations.
The core-product is ready - data will be gathered, mixed with other data, and some analytics and ML predictions are made.
Now I want to create a membership site that manages monthly payments and grants access to the data and some visualizations of that data.
I thought of Wordpress with Woocommerce subscriptions or the membership-plugin. But how do I integrate those custom reports.
My initial idea to implement reports was using React - but how do I integrate that with Wordpress?
Are there any other low-code/ no-code platform that could help with this?
Regards
Memberstack is the one I've heard of. I wouldn't create the reports using React either way, that's going to be a nightmare, you probably want to pull in a product that can manage this and just worry about importing the data. The three I know that offer this are:
Sure there are others.
There is also the permissions aspect, if you go with a full managed product you won't have to do much, but if you go with something like custom react or AWS Quicksight, you are going to want to build/buy a user/permissions management. That likely means also pulling in:
Hope that helps!
I fully agree that integrating some kind of reporting product would be the best option.
I've never worked with snowflake or palantir but it looks like that these are more enterprise scale products and not aimed for indiehacker-style entrepreneurs ...
Quicksight would be very flexible and can be embedded into a webapp including authentication/ authorization via Cognito - but afair pricing is per user
Maybe Memberful or Outsetta?
I would highly recommend Outseta
They make it super easy to add subscription checkout and authentication to your site. As well as other things like email marketing, crm, support, and live chat on your site.
Outseta looks very intersting - thanks for pointing out. I will have a look into that
Outseta + Webflow might be an ideal solution for my site. Problem is that Stripe is the only payment provider that can be used. Stripe is very Crypto unfriendly - last time I integrated an e-commerce site with stripe, after a while they told me that I have to migrate my subscribers to somewhere else, because I mentioned on my site, that my tools (for trader/ investors) can also be used to analyze crypto-charts.
Don’t want to be in that position again since my new Product can be used for crypto-investing too ...
How is the core product setup currently? Is the data to be gathered and mixed already accessible in a UI? If so I imagine you have an API set up or a way of accessing that data in the UI.
If that's the case you could lock down access to the API and use a third party auth service like Auth0 or Okta to create and manage users. Or as you say, you could use Wordpress with Woocommerce to create your membership stuff. Then you'd need an API to your reporting data and write some custom code in your Wordpress theme to allow users access.
As they say, "there's more than one way to skin a cat" and what's best for you is ultimately going to come down to your current set up.
Currently the data is stored as json files in an s3 bucket but providing the data via an API or database isn't a big deal.
The main issue (for me) would be do custom programming in WP to access and visualize the data ...
Understood. I think you'd be able to get pretty far without code in Wordpress. You can basically get Wordpress set up with WooCommerce which will manage all the user stuff. Then you can "protect" pages behind a pay wall / user membership wall which would contain your custom code for fetching your json files and displaying the content.
This is just a matter of editing the template file for the page you're protecting (which is a mix of HTML and PHP), either by writing PHP to fetch the right files/lookup in a database/contact an API and outputting that into HTML or providing it in json to the frontend and using Javascript to display it. Or both.
If you're not technical yourself, you may want to hire a dev, but if you know basic frontend and backend, it's nothing you couldn't manage yourself with a bit of reading up on Wordpress.
Let us know how you get on!
EDIT: A few links that may help you on your travels:
Creating custom page templates - https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2015/06/wordpress-custom-page-templates/
WooCommerce Paywall - https://woocommerce.com/products/paywall-for-woocommerce/#
WooCommerce Subscriptions - https://woocommerce.com/products/woocommerce-subscriptions/
Paid for plugins to extend WC functionality. You don't have to use these, but it's one approach. You could custom write this functionality, but would require more dev time. As I say, multiple routes to achieve what you want, you just need to decide the balance of code/no code and cost you're happy with.
A big thank you for providing those valuable information- it really helped a lot!
Based on that, I played around a little bit. I will use WooCommerce + WooSubscription (which I already have up and running in a WP multisite). I‘ll create my own template, fetch data with PHP and visualize it with chart.js .
Since I‘m a dev , I can do this on my own.
No problem!
Be great to see the finished product. Good luck!
If you would like to create a fast and SEO-friendly membership site, and you already checked React and WP, you should definitely look at Gatsby + WP.
I have built several sites this way and can recommend them as a starter point. They have a lot of tutorials and very good documentation. More details: https://www.gatsbyjs.com/guides/wordpress/
If you still want to go the React route, I'm about to launch Crow Authentication which can take care of the auth piece to your problem. I have a template starter repo ready for deployment using Next.js (React framework) and Vercel (hosting). I haven't officially launched quite yet but the functionality is all there. I'd be happy to help you set it up if you'd like.
looks pretty straight forward - but does crow allow user federation with google/ facebook etc?
It does not at the moment, but if that's something you are interested in, then I can start working on it.
I’d recommend woo-commerce I’ve been developing on woocommerce for 3 years. Easy to manage subscriptions can scale up with you, and the api is super easy to use. Happy to help out with some advice … just need a little more context!
Let's say I'll manage to generate static (html+javascript) files that contain the reports - would it be possible to embed those files in any kind of protected WP site with restricted access to subscribers only? I'd like to avoid to only restrict access to WP sites but still having the main data unprotected.
100% doable. If you're looking for a low-code solution https://wordpress.org/plugins/simple-membership/ has gated content baked in. (I have no affiliation with that plugin, just know it works well).