HOW TO ARCHITECT: Build a website with users private area to access personal documentation

[lauramc]

I would like to build a website with a private area for users to log in and get their (personal) documentation.

The website will have a navigation menu with access to different sections (About us, Blog, FAQ, and customers private area). Once the customer logs into the private area, s/he will see its personal details (contact details and bank account details), documentation (agreements, invoices) of the current assets and proposals of new assets to acquire.

• What is the proper technical stack to build this?
• What is the proper technical stack to manage users credentials and store their documentation (files)?
• Is it better to build the whole website as a WebApp, or build the website as a normal blog and then build the private area as a WebApp?

Please keep in mind that each user should only have access to its documentation and we can define the database as needed. Ensuring good users and documentation management is key

This is a personal business project, so I am free to choose any approach and resources.

I tried building it with Wordpress but it is a bit limited. In the future I would like to add more options in the private area such as pulling data from third party systems using APIs.

I also tried building the whole website as an Angular Single Page Application, but I have not found a good way to manage user access and credentials.

Any suggestion will be more than welcome.

[robertcarlos]

Hi @lauramc,

Welcome to Google Cloud Community!

• What is the proper technical stack to build this?
  • It would depend on your organizational needs, or how you use the application you're currently building/will be building. In this case I would suggest the following Google Cloud services:
    • Cloud Run - you can use any supported languages, access SQL databases, and render dynamic HTML pages.
    • App Engine - this is a fully managed, serverless platform for developing and hosting web applications. This is usually used for backend processing and you can deploy different versions and instances.
  • There are still other services that you can use like compute engine for VMs and Firebase so you may want to check them out.
• What is the proper technical stack to manage users credentials and store their documentation (files)?
  • You can store data in using Cloud Storage and manage users in Cloud Identity.
• Is it better to build the whole website as a WebApp, or build the website as a normal blog and then build the private area as a WebApp?
  • This would still depend on your use case. You may check each of the services I previously mentioned as you could test this on your end or you may check the links below that may serve as your reference:
    • Google Cloud web hosting 
    • Build a Website on Google Cloud 
    • Host a Static Website in Google Cloud with Cloud Storage

Hope these help.