MODx Website & Members Area. Separate or Combined

What is the concenous on using MODx as the primary website but also have a members only section within it. Would it be better to build the members area around the main website allowing access to public info plus members only info. Or from a maintenance point of view is it easier to separate the members into a subdomain MODx install?

Also if I use a members area (no transaction info stored just WLPE profile data) should I be adding an SSL certificate for that members area?

What goes in the members area? I’m not sure based on your recommendation. Will any part of it be publicly indexable by search engines? How many members do you have now and how large a community do you expect to build?


If it’s any indication as to what my answer will likely be, MODx has it all under one domain.

@rthrash, in the members area it will contain word docs, pdfs, vtm’s, ditto news and users being able to change there details/password via WLPE. This is at it’s most basic and most of this works so far using the Web groups and putting downloads inside the root or using FileDownloadPE.

The members area at the moment isn’t a user sign up process but users will be added manually to the system. Although this will change at a later date. Just not priority at the moment.

A future phase would be to use FoxyBack or FoxyCart Webuser Paid Subsciptions as the companies need for a members area is based on an annual subscription period. Love FC. Love MODx. Most logical, just not tried or got that far!

Obviously nothing member based should be indexed by the engines, apart from say a ’not a member. find out how to be’ which I imagine would be the error page of a failed login or unauthorised access page.

Member size, probably will never exceed 1,000 but you never know if it takes off! Assuming that separating it would be the most logical but again unless it 10,000+ members I assume one would consider that anyway.

Keeping it under one domain make maintaining sense from your modxcms.com example.

What about the SSL for members, although I noticed that you not running the forum under SSL. Just being secuirty minded but given the data probably a bit OTT for now.

*bump

Thought I would just bump this up one more time.