No doubt, one will agree with me that the cloud has changed the way the world does business, and changed age old models that have been employed. It’s a brave new world in the cloud, and businesses are flocking to it. Startups are not left out in this trend too.
SaaS (Software as a Service) is a model representing how big the game in the cloud really is. Interestingly, more businesses are moving to SaaS model, and it’s much a better way to launch your service by utilizing the power of WordPress – the most popular content management system in the world.
SaaS with WordPress can be focused on WordPress itself – that is, creating services for WordPress-enabled websites, or it can use WordPress as a platform to create an entirely different service. Either way, the WordPress ecosystem has proven to be of great assistance in building and running a SaaS.

Now about my project, I am the helmsman behind Yangi (http://yangi.com.ng) Development. I spent several hours if not days thinking and planning how to get the job done in the most effective way that will benefit the users and achieve its goal of existence. While working out my way on this, I enjoyed every bit of each process. Believe me; WordPress can be impressively fast – right from installing the CMS to adding plugins of varying complexities. Given the near unlimited scope of quick customization with its availability of countless plugin, this is just an entire world of unlimited possibilities.
Before starting Yangi project, I had a difficulty in choosing whether to team up with another programmer and develop the project from scratch. Well, it was difficult to do because I was the only developer in my team. Getting another developer to work alongside with me was not a good idea as it looks like to the entire team. So much trust has been placed and bet on me that I can get the real deal done, therefore without further delay, I kick started the project that promise change in the way we all access local businesses.

I started by installing WordPress on my localhost using XAMMP to experiment and work out what am actually going to build. This was the most difficult phase of the job. First, I thought of finding a theme that will suit what I intend to build. I found one that I love and I tried playing the theme structures to give it more functionality and scale it to work according to our objectives. But, the poor theme was not meant to suffer such wickedness from my hands. Worst still, I tried some other themes and got fed up. It was then I asked myself if am actually a web designer or web developer?
Well, I took my time to outline what I intend to build and how to do that. I suddenly bumped on a theme ad and I checked it out at Themeforest and it seem something workable to me even though it was a hard way to go. Rather than having to custom code several services, I took to using various managed plugins in WordPress to get the job done well, and do it fast as well.

But it didn’t stop there. The theme is very raw and not connected with what Yangi is all about. Here comes the issue of working out APIs and Frameworks that will be incorporated to it to give it a super power. I always love playing around Redux Framework and Whiteboard framework. I chose to use Redux framework because of its ability to give you powers that are out of this planet to create an engaging application. Getting assistance from my Indian friend Khan, I was able to integrate Redux framework into the theme and work is set! Yangi development started swiftly and I looked at all the efforts so far, and I saw it was good.

An awesome functionality of WordPress I love that benefited Yangi so much is the existence of the JSON REST API, or the WP REST API. Truthfully, this big thing in the realm of WordPress single handedly made Yangi project in WordPress a dream come true as SaaS model application.
From my experience in this, I came to acknowledge that the real driving force behind the API is to make WordPress a fully-fledged application framework – something any SaaS application would love to get its hands on. By this, you can easily move data in and out of your application – retrieving or updating it by means of a simple HTTP request. This could completely customize the way we have been interacting with WordPress. This way, your SaaS could be working off a truly custom WordPress back-end and admin panels. If at all, the REST API won’t stop at being a plugin and integrated into the WordPress core that will be a very huge delight developers like me.
Well, by the time Yangi got online, the REST API was useful in querying the manner in which data are being fetched from the database. Utilizing its transient feature, it worked very much like a CDN powering the whole website files to be working independently and leave less server queries using HTTP.

When it comes to scaling a service that WordPress isn’t quite suited for, you will find even more trouble. That will be the time when you look for a custom coded solution, or a different framework altogether. While working on Yangi, I faced this problem of aligning the theme to be more eccentric using HTML5 containers. But it nearly messed the whole efforts up. Apart from developing a classical application that has functional features, I still need the User Experience to be rich, excellent and memorable. I set on working out a simple UI (User Interface) design that will best fit all devices even if am not using device select rendering.
It can take forever to build a new service, but WordPress can get you going pretty quickly, even for applications that may not be well suited for the CMS. I said so, because the huge variety of plugins and themes available can help you kick off your SaaS with remarkable speed. The rapid prototyping that comes with this approach will enable you to create a working model of your business at a fraction of the cost it would have originally demanded coding from scratch. Rather than working out the hard way, a developer who knows his way around WordPress will find the process remarkably quick by utilizing the available plugins and API hooks to give traction to a project.

A product doesn’t have to be perfect in its inception I noticed. If your idea sticks, it might be time to qualify it as a fully-fledged product, either on WordPress or with a different approach. For Yangi project, I think it sticks following the user feed backs we have received while running in Beta Testing mode. I have every reason and conviction to believe that Yangi will continue to run on WordPress and grow towards perfection.

Later on, I discovered Docker. It is an open source platform that helps you build, run and deploy applications. Using Docker, you have a web container, a database container, a container that saves files, and so on. Each container is different and communicates with each other via IPs and Ports. If I had discovered it on time, I would have sure made good use of it.

I have to explore Docker to discover how it can benefit my next project for Yangi. With this, you can create a container that runs your code (this may be Apache and PHP that runs PHP scripts), and one container that holds your database (MySQL, MongoDB, and so on). But you can also do this using Vagrant, and I must admit that Vagrant is quite good at what it does. It solves the problems usually associated with working on my machine in the development stage, and it also gets close to the production environment. On the other hand though, Docker makes the local environment and production the same. Docker performs better than classical hypervisor technologies. Docker is super-fast for local development if you are using Linux. It can also be faster than traditional hypervisors, even if you’re not running Linux as your server primary OS.

When it comes to building and scaling WordPress based site, the best option is using multi DB if possible. And yes, you need to move to other frameworks in case if you are adding many features that cannot be accommodated by WordPress core. That’s what I did at Yangi.
Using WordPress to build a SaaS reduces startup development cost and direct the available funds to validate the business and scale up.

Nonetheless, I am proud to be a WordPress developer and smart at doing that. Open Source is the new order for effective development and I am excited that I can work on one!