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Development Tools

Posted by Nick Smith
Nick Smith
12,154 Points

Building a membership site

Hi Treehouse folks,

I'd be grateful for some advise on a project I'm starting (as I'm learning). It will be a membership based site and needs to support the following functionality;

Register, Login, etc Multiple membership tiers I.e gold, silver, etc Restricted access to content based on above integration with subscription billing I.e recurly Ideally integration with auth provider like auth0 or stormpath to avoid maintaining a db

The question is what languages, frameworks, tools would be best suited to this task?

I am pretty good with html, CSS and JavaScript at the moment but am looking at what else I should look to learn to build the above.

Any advice gratefully received.

Thanks,

Nick

3 Answers

Stephen Gheysens
Stephen Gheysens
11,935 Points
Stephen Gheysens
Stephen Gheysens
11,935 Points

Hi Nick. That's quite the goal, but I respect the enthusiasm!

Do you want to just create this as purely a web application or a mobile app (iOS/Android)?

I have more experience with the web side of things, and based off your experience so far, I'd recommend continuing down the Full Stack Javascript (https://teamtreehouse.com/tracks/fullstack-javascript) path or the Ruby on Rails Development path (https://teamtreehouse.com/tracks/rails-development). You're going to need to know Javascript for the front end either way, but on the back-end, you could use Javascript, Ruby, or Python (if you're only sticking to Treehouse for learning). Ruby on Rails is probably the easiest/fastest way to learn how to build a full scale web application because it comes with a lot of features built-in. It even includes features that make user authentication easy to implement, and the Treehouse course covers it - https://teamtreehouse.com/library/user-authentication-with-rails. I'd recommend going through that Rails course, and then looking into OAuth integration!

Nick Smith
Nick Smith
12,154 Points

Many thanks for the reply Stephen, I was actually leaning towards the rails side of things as after some trawling of the interwebs it seemed to be the quickest to get working due to those existing integrations.

Could I trouble you for another couple of follow on questions (which will probably seem quite dumb/obvious)

  1. If I integrate the front end with a SaaS auth provider such as auth0, what function is the back end performing? Is it essentially the locking down of the content?
  2. When you mention JavaScript as the backend are you meaning something like node.js or native JavaScript/jquery?

Thanks again and I'm advance to yourself or anyone else who might want to help a newbie with the above questions.

Thanks,

Nick

Falk Schwiefert
Falk Schwiefert
8,706 Points
Falk Schwiefert
Falk Schwiefert
8,706 Points

The other way, although I feel a little more outdated would be through PHP and using a WordPress integration if you want to stay on the web end of things.

I am looking at this as a future project as well and have been struggling with the same question. :)

Nick Smith
Nick Smith
12,154 Points

Thanks Falk, have been looking at the Wordpress option for a second project I want to build but for this first one I'd like to try and stay away from it (mainly for the experience).

Hopefully we get a few more comments on here which might help us both

Cheers,

Nick

Gareth Fenney
Gareth Fenney
1,903 Points
Gareth Fenney
Gareth Fenney
1,903 Points

Nick, Falk - would be good to hear more about what technologies you ended up using and what programs you took? I'm just embarking on a similar project so would be great to share our experiences. Similarly to Nick, I don't want to use WP as I want to use this as a learning exercise.