Ask HN: Suggest simpler tech for blog with members area | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Suggest simpler tech for blog with members area

5 pointsYuukiRey4 comments

I built a blog that also has a members-only area. It's for a family member and the users of the website are mostly 50 years and older.

The public facing content is created and maintained in Contentful. The site itself is hosted on Netlify and built with Gatsby. I used Material UI so I don't have to spend too much time on UX and design questions. The members only area is built with Firebase auth and firestore. Firestore because they create events, and then other members (~ 50 people) can sign up for those events. They can also invite new members and I built some lightweight user management functionality (assign users to roles, such as admin). For signup emails I created a SendGrid account. This would also be used for emails sent to all members notifying them of new events.

This all worked out quite well but it feels like the opposite of boring technology and KISS. I don't have anyone experienced enough I could ask, so I thought I'd ask HN.

What would you have used?

Wordpress.

I know that is a terrible answer for the vast majority of us on HN. But if this is for a family member, and dozens of others, who are not tech-savvy, don't re-invent the wheel. Just give them something that works.

WordPress.

Technically skilled people, developers in particular, tend to look down upon it because of reasons such as its codebase and plugin API not being exactly clean.

It gets the job done, though, and it's pretty robust, too, especially given its long history and dynamic ecosystem.

In my opinion, WordPress doesn't nearly get enough praise for enabling people to create websites.

I deliberately chose WordPress for my business website because it allows me to delegate the nitty-gritty of running a website to developers who specialise in that sort of software.

Could I have done it myself using a static site generator and various supporting services for providing dynamic behaviour? Sure, but it'd have been much more work with arguably little to no benefit for something that's not my core business.

This stack is aligned with a recent JAMStack trend and indeed involves a lot of different API/tech. If I built something like that with a "boring" stack, I would go with Django and host it in Heroku, for example. Still works pretty well.

And how would you have handled creating and editing the public content (what's currently done through Contentful)? Some WYSIWYG editor for Django or hand-rolled forms? Also would you have used a traditional, relational DB for the members-only part?

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