Another Side of WordPress SaaS

One thing about the strategy where you hedge your WordPress bets by offering your wares as a SaaS built on WordPress is that it opens up the question of what’s in your SaaS.

Once you’ve created a setup where your SaaS customers are interacting with your WordPress server, a potential next step is to incorporate some third-party package into your build and offer access to that as part of your service.

Anticipated?

Some of the more complex plugins out there absolutely anticipate this sort of use and have options that let you license the plugin accordingly. Others, less so, and it’s also worth considering that nothing says you can’t take free plugins and offer them wrapped up in your service in the same way.

It’s easy to see how you might end up with a scenario where you’re wrapping up a paid plugin with a lifetime, unlimited license that doesn’t cost very much and then reselling it heavily. It’s the kind of thing that makes you wonder whether you’re taking advantage, but then again, the unlimited licensing is largely targeting agencies who are reselling the product at a markup, just not necessarily in SaaS packaging.

By and large, I think it’s legit (though I’m open to counterarguments). If there’s an unlimited license on offer, then SaaS resale seems entirely above-board, from a licensing perspective. And, for better or worse, there’s the fact that GPL licensing pretty clearly requires that you let people take your code and resell it if they want, just as long as they credit you and retain the same licensing.

The admin side

One potential problem with a SaaS setup is that your end users may well need at least some access to WordPress admin functions. But you don’t really want them having to learn their way around the back end, probably don’t want them poking around in there in any case, but on the other hand you probably don’t want to have to write a front-end version of the admin functions.

For this, though, there are a couple of plugins that expose some or all of the back-end interface to front-end users.

The one that I’m using for this particular need (for the time being, at least) is WPFrontend Admin. It enables you to create front-end pages like this one, where the guts of the user admin interface are nicely nestled inside a front-end page:

screen shot of a WordPress user admin table.

It’s a clunky design, just like it is on the back end, but you can pretty it up a bit by overriding various CSS settings. I haven’t really dug into that yet, but what this gives PeakZebra is a way to allow clients with the right access privileges to manage the user’s they’re allowing on their instance of the PeakZebra service.

PeakZebra users

As it happens, I’ve also written a spinoff of the PeakZebra form blocks that specifically map to WordPress user account fields (and meta) and that are specifically for use on the front end. They’re implemented using the Interactivity API which means they will at some point confer special, magical powers.

But implementing a full copy of the user admin interface at this point in PeakZebra’s development seems like a pretty significant detour, given that I can just surface the user admin functionality on the front end using the plugin.

The thing about the Frontend Admin plugin, though, is that it’s expressly built for the scenario where you resell a complex plugin. Let’s say you take the Groundhogg CRM. It basically lives on the admin side of the site where you install it. But you can make all those pages magically available on the front end with the Frontend Admin.

And this trick works with all sorts of plugins. Check out their list of common applications used this way.

I don’t think this is the future of WordPress, exactly. But we’re going to see more cases where people are using this sort of setup to keep their own modifications hidden on the server side of things. Whether this is a good thing is debatable, but I think overall it’s a good thing to have a business ecology around the core open-source WordPress project, and the status quo of how business exists in the WordPress world is clearly being seriously re-evaluated right now.

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