Setting the Stage

First, I will acknowledge the irony that this blog is written on Blogger instead of on a WordPress site; am old-school and have been using Blogger and really have no need to change.

Motivation

I, as others that I know, have been struggling to figure out a good solution for handling user-managed content embedded in a MEAN (MongoDB, Express, AngularJS, and Node.js) stack application.

One solution that I have considered was writing my own MEAN stack CMS (Content Management System). However, every time I think to do this I feel like I am re-inventing the wheel.

note: By the way, I do have a limited implementation of such a MEAN stack CMS called NarrowCMS https://github.com/larkintuckerllc/narrow-cms-example.

Why WordPress? Simply because it is popular: https://managewp.com/14-surprising-statistics-about-wordpress-usage.

Why not just use WordPress for application development?  First, it is WordPress and second it is built on PHP.  Enough said.

General Overview

First, I have developed this blog based on WordPress 4.4.2 running in a local development environment provided by Varying-Vagrant-Vagrants: https://github.com/Varying-Vagrant-Vagrants/VVV.  Also, Variable VVV to quickly spin up new environments: https://github.com/bradp/vv.

Second, as a disclaimer, I am neither very proficient in WordPress nor PHP but have enough general software development knowledge to get things working.  I, however, am pretty handy at MEAN stack development.

The first approach that I will explore is simply using WordPress as a source of user-managed content and pull in content into a MEAN stack application.

The second approach is to use WordPress to serve up the user-managed content and then hand the user off to the MEAN stack application for the "hard stuff". In this case, will want to be able to transparently hand off the WordPress authenticated user.

Not sure if I will get to another scenario in this blog, but it would be interesting to explore using WordPress and the MEAN Stack application as above with the authentication happening on the MEAN stack application.