Suitability for SaaS

Hello Everyone,

As the purposes of Wordpress are mostly for business, I was wondering if anyone has considered using WP as the backend for a SaaS and Frontity as the front end app?

Here is what I am thinking of doing and would like some input on the feasibility of this. The Frontity docs say that its suitable for a network.

I am planning on using WP multisite and WP Ultimo together. Wp Ultimo will create a new site for every client and manage things like subscriptions. Each site will be the same for every client - just their data will be specific to them. When the theme is updated essentially the app is updated for every client site.

Can I make this work so that frontity is the front end for every client site? I noticed that some urls need to be hard coded. Is their a way of making it automatic that a client is redirected to their site for example my-app.com/site1?

I really appreciate your input and any challenges there might be with this.

Regards,
Jack

Hi @junkjackfountain

Welcome to the Frontity community. Your project sounds super interesting and we’re glad you’re thinking of trying out Frontity for it.

Frontity works with WP multisite, and a single Frontity installation can be used to serve the content from the different sites in a WP multisite installation, or even from completely separate sites from different domains. Furthermore with WP multisite you can use either subdomains or sub-directories. You can do this using the match property in frontity.settings.js to distinguish one site from another. See our docs here for more on this.

The main thing you will need to do is that when WP Ultimo spins up a new site it also triggers a script that adds the info for the new site to frontity.settings.js.

Hope this helps. We would love to feature your project in our showcases page so do please keep us informed regarding how your project is progressing.

@junkjackfountain sounds really interesting! did you manage to find a solution. please DM in case, as I am working on something similar.

@junkjackfountain @morningsun Rather than DM it would be great if you could share any solution you found here so that the whole community can benefit. That way anyone who has a similar problem has a resource that they can go to. Thanks.

hi @junkjackfountain and @morningsun - interested how far you have progressed this. I am researching something similar. Please contact me to discuss

Hi - interested in finding out more about your project.

Hi Everyone, thanks for all the great ideas. Sorry I haven’t checked the forum in a while because I wasn’t getting a reply earlier and didn’t think this would work. So there are 2 reasons frontity works for me for a SaaS with WP. The first reason is that it won’t be obvious that WP is being used for the backend(better security etc.) Also a single page app for a SaaS using frontity and WP is more efficient, better performing for the app itself. Components can be used from Metronic etc. I’ve been playing with it for a while and haven’t been able to get it working yet. What I am building is a claims management system. I developed a claims management system for work and want to share it as a SaaS and Php is what I want to use. My choices are WP which has the backbone already created (with multisite and wpultimo) or Laravel. WP multisite out of the box supports teams or members with little modification amongst other things. I hope others are inspired to use frontity to create an app. Thank you so much mburridge. I’ll post if I get it working frontity has been great so far, but its the multisite issues that I need to solve. JS isn’t my expertise. If anyone else gets frontity working with multisite please post how you did it.

Hi @junkjackfountain

What specific problems are you having getting multisite working with Frontity? Did you check out these docs?