Seeking advise from you lovely people on a new client I Just landed

Hello my lovely folks -

This is my first post here although I have been a long time lurker and have always found posts here to be very educational and motivating. My apologies for asking for stuff in my first post and not contributing to the knowledge base here. However, I am not a developer and sadly have very little to contribute. I come here to learn

My client runs a lovely business networking event in London every month. They do have a site, but it is very old and needs changing. So here are the 2 main objectives:

1. Must be a membership site where people have to sign up. Some content will be made available to non members and most only to members. It is going to be for free but we need to be able to make the memberships paid later on..
   (i am thinking- may be first 200 gets in for free and then we charge a little)
   
   
2. there needs to an events plugin of some sort. - so that we can also post events and then people can sign up and get stuff added to their calendar etc etc...

This client is very important for me as there is a partnership dialogue going on.. i e i just can not mess it up :-(

So, any theme suggestions or plugin suggestions are most welcome..

Many thanks!

 

That is critical, and makes only one answer possible. Hire a professional developer to do the work.

You said the client is important. Treat them that way. If they neede a heart bypass would you do the surgery or call a doctor? If they needed a bridge would you design and build it or hire an engineer. If they really are important then you should not gamble on your ability to do what looks simple (web development); but in reality is as complex as any engineering project.

 

thanks COBOLdinosaur for the insight... not a developer but have an army of them behind me... question was to see if any one can suggest any particular theme / solution that they have had joy with... although this will be our 78th project this year - Membership sites are just some thing that has not been asked of us yet. As we are all trying out different themes, franticly if I may add.. thought i will spread the sphere a little and try to dip in to the combined knowledge here..

 

Hello shanghoshal.

What COBOLdinosaur said is correct. But as i can see from your reply you already have an army of developers behind you. That's good, but some of them should have already know the answer to your questions.

Anyway, what you need is a top notch high quality premium theme and 2 awesome plugins.
Please not that i am not affiliated with any of those in any way and neither i work for them.

Theme = Try Avada theme from Envato Market
Plugins = For Memberships s2Member does exactly what you need with memberships, both free and paid when you want and has tons of features. It's more complicated than other plugins so it's good that you have developers behind you.
The other plugin you need is one of the many event calendars out there. There are a lot, and i have only tried the Events Calendar Pro Suite by Modern Tribe and All in one Event Pro Bundle by timely.

With those tools the job for your developers will be much much easier and you will provide a quality solution for your client/partner.

Good Luck !!!!

 

Sorry I went off in the wrong direction. I made an assumption that you did not have the resources you have. As for themes and plugins I can't off any help. I specifically barred the use of third party code years ago because all our clients put security at the top of every requirement. The only way we can know that we have clean highly secure systems is to write everything in-house and make every client's architecture unique so if we do make a mistake we are not having to get security patches out to every client and spend time assuring them that they are secure.

 

I completely understand your thoughts around security and it's a must that everything should be developed in -house for enterprise size solutions. As for medium/small companies usually the traffic they receive and the budget they have available restricts them of having such solutions like you said.

Lastly, you can always get an open source plugin and make it your own making sure it's safe and does exactly what you need. That's the beauty of open source isn't it ?

 

Not when it comes to security. Any code designed to restrict or prevent access can be defeated if the architecture containing it is built around known structures and formats. Real security does not reside in accessible coded functions, it is buried in core structural members the are uniquely configured to make the only way to find pathways a multi-level trial and error excercises that is easily detected by automation. You can never prevent perimeter breeches but it is little more than a nuisance if you detect and neutralize serious threats to core assets.

My clients include some very large companies in financial services who are under attack every day. In 50 years of programming my clients have been hacked a few times through the perimeter defenses; but none have never had damage or unauthorized access to sensitive or financial data.

All open source is a potential attack vector even if you customize it unless you rewrite the core; in whch case you might as well do a custom solution. Open source pieces are fine for doing widgets, standard presentation, and common functional requirement, but anything that will interact with components that have privilege to secure assets needs to be customized and not use open source structures, classes, or interfaces.

Most of the time it is easier to do things custom. The initial development takes a little longer, but the maintenance cost of custome is a tiny fraction of the cost of keeping third party code up to date; plus you are forced to jump through hoops to do add any feature the author did not think was needed.

 

I completely agree that if you have sensitive data like that you should have a custom solution.
Companies with not such important services like the financial ones, fx trading online gambling and such, they can live with a third party solution i believe.

 

1. For your client's membership site you can use Subscribly or Avada theme. They both have good features. I think your client would love them.
2. You can use s2Member plug in for your membership site. you can also use "IP filter" for security reason.
Thanks!