What do I need to learn, in order to do this

#1

Hello Community,
I`m on a project of building a nice online plattform with nice features and all kinds of great functionality, but that stuff I’m not going to do alone or at least I will not be able to accomplish yet.For now, to get me started, I’d like to get the minimal viable product going. Meaning, its going to be a premade wordpress theme …
Here is my problem and my question though:

  • The plattform will be about having physical products be manufactured only after a threshold of buyers opted in. Therefore I need to integrate some kind of tipping point payment (similar to kickstarter). I could use stripe or wepay for that.

  • Secondly the buyers need to be able to see the status of how many buyers already opted in in some kind of diagram on the product side as well as in their own account. THis means there also should be accounts for the buyers of course.

So, what skills and programming languages should I be learning, in order to get this accomplished? I know already a bit of html, css, javascript. I was also looking at Ruby which people tell me might be a great tool for any kind of webapp.
What is your opinion. How can I reach my goal?

#2

I’m not a pro, so take all this with a pinch of salt…

The bare-bones of what you want to achieve is pretty easy. You’ll need to pick up a little back-end knowledge to deal with the user accounts and tracking the number of ‘pledges’ before triggering the manufacturing process, so learning a database and some server side stuff is necessary.

How much you pick up is up to you and how much you want to custom build this. Also, what stack you use will determine what you focus on.

If you stick with FreeCodeCamp, complete the front end cert and then go straight into the backend cert (skip data vis) you’ll be able to make all of this using HTML, CSS, Node, Mongo, and maybe React…

If you’re set on using Wordpress, you might want to focus more on PHP and MySQL, although you can probably use other backend tech with it instead.

What you’re after seems like it’s probably desirable enough that it already exists as a Wordpress plugin, or may come with other merchant CMSs like Shopify.

Depending on how much HTML, CSS and JS you already know, you may be able to start hacking away at a good 50% of the code right now - so dive in and google the problems you can’t solve off the top of your head :slight_smile:

#3

Hello @JacksonBates,
thank you very much for your detailed answer. Seems reasonable what you say and I will consider to continue with the freecodecamp material. Although I`m still very curious what this RubyOnRails is about and what advantage it would bring learning that - and/or, if learning that would be a viable alternative to the plan you described.
Any other opinion?

Greetings

#4

Ruby on Rails is another good option that will let you do what you want. It’s also pretty modern and well used, so your skills would be transferable. I believe there is still I higher demand for Ruby devs (at least that seems to be true in my city), but Node’s growth has been phenomenal and it’ll probably overtake Ruby soon.

You could look at http://www.theodinproject.com/ for a Ruby curriculum similar to FCC - I haven’t used it, so can’t really say how it compares to FCC.