Thinking of moving to BC, some questions

[teckcrew]

Hi,

I own a small agency and I've been using wordpress for a long time. I have heard good things about BC, so I am looking into it, and here are some questions I have first:

1. Can BC process custom JSON apis?  I have a 3rd party eCommerce API I need to integrate with.  This is a u-haul service for storage unit companies to implement their self storage api.  The service has several methods, like getLocationInfo, listOpenSpaces, purchaseSpace, etc.  I need to get the info from the getLocationInfo and present a form to the user and allow them to add their Credit card info and submit the form.  Is this possible with BC?

2. I need SSL for this API.  What support does BC have for SSL?  Am I forced to use it on ALL pages, or can I specify it to only be used on certain pages?

3. Overall, how does it compare to wordpress in relation to the speed of development for basic local sites?

Thank you very much,

Clint

[Liam Dilley]

1. BC supports SOAP (XML based) API that is public with a REST API in beta. You will need a 3rd party setup to have BC talk to your other service and vice versa.

If you want a form to take payment that interacts with a 3rd party other then BC itself, as long as it does not have any server side components this can run on your BC site, its just HTML and javascript.

2. ALL BC API runs through its secure service. All BC sites have a shared secure hosting through worldsecuresystems.com domain. If you have a domain mysite.com and  your /mypage you want to be secure you link to that page as mysite.worldsecuresystems.com/mypage

3. This is a SAAS system - software as a service, hosted solution that runs on the Amazon Infrastructure and maintained by Adobe.  You can not run this locally. I personally do not like comparing it to Wordpress. Wordpress is free and open source with lots of plugins and PHP based, this is Hosted with no code access and more secure in many ways.

Wordpress sites you have to maintain the servers and system for while BC that side is done by Adobe.

Many people say Wordpress is free and does way more then BC... It actually does not! Wordpress out of the box does not remotly have the same amount of features and ability as BC does out of the box. IT is through the plugins, extensions that other people code, not wordpress or the ability to manipulate the PHP code base that forms it to produce sites and have more options then BC does. With that ability comes many obvious problems from maintenance, compatibility and of course the ability to be hacked or have data manipulated or stolen.

[teckcrew]

Thanks Liam, I really appreciate your response.

I have read this post and see many people are thinking Adobe is getting out of the BC business, because of the pricing change that happened a few months ago, and other things, from this post:  http://businesscatalyst.com/bc-blog/business-catalyst-yearly-plans-to-be-discontinued-all-sites-rene...

http://businesscatalyst.com/bc-blog/business-catalyst-yearly-plans-to-be-discontinued-all-sites-rene...When I read this, it’s obvious to me that there is a decent amount of partners who are  frustrated/angry about the level of support/communication from Adobe.  Is there a functionality roadmap or some indication that Adobe is going to support BC long into the future?  I really want BC to work, because the idea looks awesome, but I need some kind of reassurance before I commit my agency to it.   

[teckcrew]

Liam,

A few more questions/comments:

I have a colleague that used BNC about 3 years ago and reported 3 things to me that I am concerned with:

1. He said that there is a lot of spam that comes from the publicaly accessible forms.  Is there not a captcha or some other mechanism that prevents spammers from abusing any external facing forms?
2. He also told me when I create a site for a client, there are 2 sites that are created, the myclientsdomain.com site and something like myclientsdomain.secureworldsystems.com (or something like that).  Does this mean that all my https traffic has to use that myclientsdomain.secureworldsystems.com domain? If not, what exactly is that for?  I would hope I can use my own domain for http and https traffic.
3. The last one was systems issues.  He said the system was down frequently and he was constantly chatting with Adobe’s system admin support to get help.  Is the system more secure now and how often are there outages?

Thank you,

Clint

[Liam Dilley]

1. Older and newer versions of both BC's captcha and Googles. Has a module for honeypot anti spam as part of the forms.. Other things you can do as well.

2. Two sites are NOT created, your site will run through several domains. BC uses a shared SSL certificate so you will have https YOURSITE.worldsecuresystems.com, you will either have a YOURSITE.businesscatalyst.com or YOURSITE.yourdomain.com as a development URL and then as many domains on the site as you have or need for your project. All your HTTPS traffic will need to go through the secure domain (The pages you will take payment)

3. BC has never been down frequently, but has been on the Amazon infrastructure for some time and BC has near 100% uptime for quite some time. The system has never been hacked, you have no access to the server code to mess with it and BC holds a PCI Level 1 Compliance - It is very secure.

Hope that helps.