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My goal is to make a user manual WP site for the web app that my company is selling.

My issue is that the web app has some differences in functionality for different clients. For example, we have a web form for managing contacts (first name, last name, address, etc.) and this web form may differ from client to client, as some want it to have a button to start a Skype call while others don't want to see this button on their version of the interface.

As there are differences, the user manual will differ (different screenshots, different description). But approximately 80% of the manual will be the same.

So what I wanna do is create a single manual (using Posts for different sections of the manual and Pages for different clients) where some parts will be different, depending on a Page (depending on a client, who is viewing the manual).

How should I approach this? Should I look for a plugin to extend the Post Editor to allow for various conditions? Should I write something myself?

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  • Your dependency is the client/user, not the page. Sounds like you probably need a membership plugin of some kind. Google Chris Lema.
    – Caspar
    Commented Apr 1, 2016 at 13:12
  • @Caspar thanks for your comment. However, membership won't do it for me as I'll have to post the entire section of the manual for each member and change it slightly. The problem here is that if we make an adjustment in our web app, we'll have to go through all of the members pages and make the same change in the manual. I'm trying to avoid that
    – al_x13
    Commented Apr 1, 2016 at 13:19

2 Answers 2

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I can think of two easy ways to achieve this...

Using Custom Fields (or Simple Fields plugin)

You could use checkboxes for "Display Form," "Display Skype Button," etc. and work it into your template to display the section if the checkbox is checked.

Using Categories

Or your Pages could actually use category queries, with the categories being "Client A," "Client B," etc.

Either way, you'll be able to have, say, the Skype button show on multiple clients' pages.

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You can use multiple themes for this. I had a similar website with 80% code is similar. There were three educational institutes with logos and address different. Rest was all same. Some courses were different. There was minor differences between them like Menu item, widgets and content on the page.

  1. Install any theme. Make it the parent. Then create three child themes for each company. The child can have only style.css file.

  2. Install a "Theme Switcher" for switching between themes. It is a dropdown widget for changing the company or theme

  3. In the case of menu item there is an option for "visibility" in the box and you put this code

    wp_get_theme() == 'child1'

  4. For Widget, install a "Widget Logic" plugin. This plugin allows you to add a condition for display. You can the same condition there.

  5. For page content... you can add PHP code inside the page and display different content for each theme/company. You can use the same code as above

if ( wp_get_theme() == 'child2' ) {

}

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  • Using different themes/child themes will also work, but I think it should be mentioned to keep all the main styles in the parent theme and do tweaking in the child themes, rather than copying the parent's CSS to each style.css. It's probably what you've done in your situation, just want to make sure it's clear to OP/other readers! (Would be a hassle to update multiple files. Plus redundant CSS is a waste of load time.)
    – Against SO OpenAI Partnership
    Commented Apr 1, 2016 at 14:59

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