WordPress or a CMF?

  • mikemanusama

    (@mikemanusama)


    10 years, 10 months ago

    Hey all,

    I am working on a job board site and am in charge of presenting new solutions for our website moving forward. Right now the website is ASP.NET and built on Umbraco and a bit outdated and we are looking to put a fresh new strategy in place to make the website easier to update without having to break the functionality it currently has.

    My question is if the main goals for the site are to

    a.) connect to a CRM (Salesforce) to handle all of the customers in the database
    b.) manage email lists and send out newsletters (via Pardot – which plays well with Salesforce)
    c.) trigger 2 different emails to 2 different people when a job is applied for

    is this something that can be controlled in WordPress or does this too specific a case to let WordPress try and handle. I’v worked with Symfony in the past but not nearly enough to know how to build a complete web application off of it, and if some of these job board plugins can meet the requirements needed on this project I would much rather make WordPress the solution for the website going forward.

    I hope the question wasn’t too broad – just looking for some feedback on what some of the more experienced people in here would recommend. Thanks in advance!

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
  • Jason King

    (@jasoncharlesstuartking)

    10 years, 10 months ago

    I think it’s wise to use good third-party CRM and e-newsletter tools rather than try to do everything in WordPress.

    Salesforce integration is mostly one-way – for example, you can send data to SF via a web-to-lead form – unless you can pay a consultant to do some fancy coding. If you need to share user data between them, that’s not easy.

    But for an email list that might be all you need. There are WordPress plugins to help you connect WP to SF.

    Maybe look at https://ifttt.com/ or one of the similar services that can be used to trigger actions (e.g. send an email) when some event happens on your website.

    Thread Starter mikemanusama

    (@mikemanusama)

    10 years, 10 months ago

    Thanks for the input. The company is pretty set on using Salesforce and Pardot for their CRM and ESP.

    Given that are you saying trying to make that all work in side WordPress is a bad idea and to consider a CMF or are you saying that building a WordPress site with SF and Pardot integration is capable – and that the email processes can be triggered by the ifttt software?

    I am obviously not latching onto those comments as a definitive answer as I know there are factors that sometimes come into play, but assuming you know more than me, I just want to make sure if I start researching this as a viable solution, it is one that has the capacity of being done. Thanks again!

    Jason King

    (@jasoncharlesstuartking)

    10 years, 10 months ago

    I’ve (with and without a plugin) used WordPress up to send data to Salesforce. For example, visitors fill out a membership form on WordPress and the data appears in SF as a lead. Simple to do.

    But define “integration”. If you needed to connect WordPress and Salesforce user accounts to share data back and forth, I suspect that would be much more difficult. So you’d need to make a list of your needs and define them as processes that need to happen.

    There have been occasions where IFTTT solved my problems of getting one tool to connect to another, but only to perform a specific task, not at any deeper level of integration, and some applications are supported much better than others.

    At which point I probably reached the limit of my knowledge and defer to others’ suggestions…

    Thread Starter mikemanusama

    (@mikemanusama)

    10 years, 10 months ago

    Well even at that I thank you for your input. On my to-do is to get a clear understanding of all the needs we have and see what processes need to be done behind the scenes in order to make it all work. Thanks again

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)

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