I am in the process of developing a multi vendor marketplace which also includes an ecosystem support - much like houzz.com. I have contacted many vendors, and they recommend custom programming using php.
Here are a basic list of requirements:
Directory service: Customers to be able to look up against products/areas/vendors based on their specified geo location
Open a Store Option: Vendors to be able to open their stores - A one page website about the company - update logo, about the company, upload images , ratings, reviews, customers to be able to bookmark their favourite studios, send enquiry
Community interface: 2 pronged approach - vendor - vendor ( closed community - not for public access), customer - vendor ( open access)
Image and video Gallery:
General Enquiry section:for customers to share their questions, etc
Featured pages: showcasing curated articles, ratings
membership / Subscription Options
Since it is a business, my priority would be to ensure the brand is well represented, the user experience is seamless, the data and portal are secure, we can manage the updates from our end to ensure faster market response and also, the site should not go down, the time to market is high
Question 1: Open source or Custom CMS?
However, there are also open source platform choices… I need your recommendation if I need to invest in the custom php or go in for the open source platform… Kindly help??
Question 2: Customization and maintenance of open source platforms
How easy is it to customize the open source platforms? I am finding that there are multiple wordpress themes that match. Can I integrate multiple themes into a single user experience
Question 3: Freelance developer or a company?
As a business, what is more reliable ? A freelance developer or having an agreement with an organization.
I am a novice in this technology space. Kindly excuse my non technical language or very obvious/ ridiculous questions!!!
personally i would not recomend to create a custom CMS, this would be too expensive and would take too much. As for OpenSource CMS i would recomend octoberCMS https://octobercms.com/ it is using the actuall standards in webdevelopment and it is based on laravel framework so it is easy to find a freelancer, with the basic installation and view plugins avaliable on the website you can already have a website with login/registration/user management/custom user input data and multi project setup.
Question 2: Customization and maintenance of open source platforms
currently in OctoberCMS you can create Modules which contains Components, the components can be easily setup in any page and the Modules are often independant small parts, which allows you to customize anything witout changing the actuall source code(so further updates will work well)
Question 3: Freelance developer or a company?
Because of many small Modules and Components, youre able to spread the Module development over multiple freelancers(as long as the Modules don’t have dependencies to other Modules), the best way to go there is to think about the required components/modules and don’t think about the project as a whole, so instead of saying “i need this project my budget is x make the whole website”, say “i need a module so a user is able to do this one special thing”. this way you can see if a freelancer did good job or if you have to find a new one but you didnt lost much money.
But iam a novice in business, iam just a programmer
EDIT: there 2 things which are not easy to accomplish
the site should not go down
therefore you need a good hoster, which can handle this but a even the best one have a 99.99% uptime so the site may go down
about freelancer, i think it is really hard to handle since freelancer might have some other projects running in parallel and personally i would say to manage a group of freelancers is a really hard part
Thanks a lot for your response . Really appreciate you taking the time to explain… It has been very informative. I will definitely evaluate the platform…
