GrowSense wordpress site

[John JR]

I managed to get wordpress installed on 2 of my webservers and I'm thinking of using it to host the GrowSense website, documentation, blog, shopping cart, etc.

I'll need to do some more experimentation with it to see whether it'll do what we want, but wordpress is pretty popular and pretty powerful so I think it should work well.

View the "coming soon page" I added to the wordpress site here:

http://growsense.io/

Eventually I'd like to turn Maria's website design into a wordpress template and use that. But for now I just chose one of the built-in ones.

The second server can be viewed at:

http://www2.growsense.io

This will act as a mirror, plus it's where I'll do all experimentation with various modules before implementing them into the primary server.

I'll hopefully eventually be able to make them synchronise so the primary server content, etc. is all completely backed up to the second server keeping both identical to each other. Then if the primary server goes down people are automatically redirected to the second server so there's no downtime.

One advantage of wordpress is it has a lot of different modules we can use to add various functionality.

It will allow all GrowSense resources to be located in a single site, rather than having one site for the PR side of things, a different one for the documentation, and a different one for the shop, etc. And it means every aspect of it is easily editable.

Self hosting is means it's virtually free, but I need to perfect the redundancy mechanisms so if one server goes down it automatically switches over to a mirror. This is where the DIY server farm / cloud concept comes in.

Eventually it will probably be worth moving to professional cloud hosting once GrowSense is bringing in enough revenue to pay for it. But in the early stages I consider keeping running costs low to be a good idea.

Does anyone have any experience with wordpress?

If you do I'm keen to get input into what modules, functionality, etc. you recommend for it.

Otherwise I'll just keep playing around with it until I figure it out.

Cheers,

John