Building a dynamic book

Question

My current project involves creating a user guide. The guide needs to be dynamic such that a different version is built into a book depending on who is downloading it/what params are passed to it. The data which is hidden in certain instances must also be private (shouldn't be possible for a reader to see the hidden data by editing the src files).

My first guess is to make all the pages into html and use some javascript to decide what gets shown and what doesn't (have some small script which passes some params to the js so it can decide what to hide). However, I'm fairly sure this method would not be private, i.e. the html could be edited or just read to see what was hidden.

What would be the software recommendations for a project such as this? Am I roughly write with a web style tech stack or are there alternatives? What would good modules to use and abuse be for this?

Answer 1

You could use a static site generator such as Vuepress or Hugo. There are many others. The idea is the same:

Editors write their content in Markdown (Or Roxygen, or Wikitext, or reStructuredText...). These are static text files stored on a central site on your intranet.

You have, say, three different build scripts (shellscripts): one for each of your 3 user-categories/groups, that transform different subsets of your documents from markdown to HTML. At the end of the transformation process, the 3 uppermost parent directories containing the customized subsets of HTML files are copied to different directories on a webserver.

At the end you have a website with locations say /basic-documentation, /advanced-documentation, /admin-documentation, and you maintain one username-list (with different access-rights) for each location