The Huff 'n Puff Big Bad Website ( and it's tools )

[bramwolf]

Hey Guys,

One of my clients asked me to look at the options for a very complex website, what to use and how to do it. And to be honest i've been thrown in at the deep end a little bit. There is so much software out there and it's kinda hard to try everything out especially in combination with each other, so I thought I would ask if anyone had any experience with such a website and the tools needed to get it up and running. I think the things I'm tryin to achieve are to complex to build solely in ProcessWire since it needs alot of complex modules, but I would love your take in this  This is a list of things I would like to achieve within the website:

- For one, the website will need dynamic content: news articles, company listings, company profiles, Job application listings ( doesn't have to be a full recruitement module per se )

- Memberships. Two types of memberships, a paid subscription for advertisers/companies that will be listed. And a free membership for visitors with personal interests, interests logging and preferences.

- Advertising platform. My clients wants to sell subscriptions to advertisers though a webshop, and place them on the site and place banners on the site for them according to fixed paid-for agreements ( ex. 30.000 presentations of the banner over a period of 2 months ). Here we'll also need to track click throughs and be able to supply documentation about displays and performance of the banners. For this I was thinking about Google's Doubleclick although I haven't found it what it costs on their website.

- Marketing automation. My client is looking for a platform that handles marketing automation for the free subscribed members. We would like to be able to segments the users, and target them according to interests, and naturally follow up and our offers. It would make sense to be able to use the same platform for holding the user data, as not to have a client system in our CMS and have a seperate one in our Marketing Automation software.

First I was looking for one system to do all of this, but I think it next to impossible to achieve that. So now I'm thinking a good and expandable base CMS with good integration options for 3th party platforms and modules. My goal is not to create all these modules myself considering the complexity of just one of them, but to create a nicely integrated system which covers all attributes using as much pre-exisiting systems as possible for fast delivery and having fully tested and functional systems.

Have any of you ever built such a site, or have any ideas what kinds of CMS or platforms you would use to achieve it? I would love to hear your ideas!

Thanks in advance,
Bram Wolf

  

 

[Tom.]

Hello Bramwolf, 

As Processwire is a CMF it can do all of these. However it will require quite a lot of custom coding. If you aren't looking to do that, then you will have to use multiple platforms. 

Getting them to all work together, could prove a nightmare and blow your house down. For the CMS part, you could use ProcessWire and for the membership part you could also use ProcessWire and Stripe/PayPal quite easily. Personally I would suggest Stripe. 

Advertising platform you can use something like https://www.adbutler.com/ and plug that into ProcessWire, and for Marketing Automation you can now use something like https://mailchimp.com/features/marketing-automation/.

The thing that I'll have no idea about is segmenting you users based on personal interest, pages they have visited etc. To me that will be your biggest bulk of work as to track all of this is big data and will require crazy optimisation or a huge database.

[rick]

Hi @bramwolf,

That's an interesting project you have because some of the items you list are what I am currently working on. I am rebuilding my site from the ground up to accommodate some of these items, so it's appears to be duplicating your project. I don't want to hijack your thread, but I will pass along what I am going through.

- The dynamic content for news articles, company profiles, and the like, is easily handled by ProcessWire. You won't have any issues there.

- The way I am approaching your membership requirements is that each user must register, which grants them read-only rights to view my applications (your free membership item). Then a user may select one or more applications to subscribe, which elevates their rights to administer the selected applications (additional user licenses, subscription payments, reporting, etc.). I changed the login to use an email address rather than a user name because I don't want Peggy Sue in Ohio colliding with Peggy Sue in Florida.

- There are any number of solutions available that handle advertising for web sites, such as openx, google ads, doubleclick, revive, etc. However, ad blockers can limit these. I wrote a wp plugin many years ago to handle advertising that I am now porting to ProcessWire. I'm in the deep end too considering I am learning how to incorporate some of my older code into the ProcessWire way of doing things.

- Your job listing also falls under the dynamic content.

- The marketing automation can be done through cookies. Tracking user interest on your client's site is simple enough by storing elements. The issue comes later when you analyze that data. Adding unique ids to targeted emails will also let you track user responses.

Hope this helps, and good luck to you.