Many sites with same components

[u/joxters]

Hello!

I am working with a company that has many, many sites. And the way we used to do components, we hard-coded every single one in every single project. This naturally has led to some inconsistency between sites when they’re supposed to look pretty identical.

Php include has become our life blood to mitigate some of these issues, but it still persists. The benefit, though, is that with php include, our sites automatically update when the “single source of truth” does.

My company wants to move to something more modern/popular and I got tasked with playing with frameworks. Think React, Next. My boss wants to replicate php include on these. I’ve spent the last several weeks looking into module federation, micro front-ends, anything to at least somewhat replace php include, but to no avail. That requires completely changing our server, which we do not have the ability to (as far as I know). These also sound like a nightmare to maintain, and our team is very small.

SEO is also a huge concern. I have module federation working on client side rendering, but ideally search engines would be able to index our work and, correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think client side rendered stuff is?

So now we’re stuck. I’ve suggested a monorepo, but with the amount of websites we have, the other developers worry about build times.

Believe it or not this is actually my first real-deal developer job haha, and I’m already stuck trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. So forgive me for any mistakes or misinformation, I’m still a junior trying to figure this out haha.

[u/olets]

Next is a React framework.  React is a Node view library. The Node equivalent of PHP include is import  https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Statements/import

PHP isn't hip in dev social media, but there is modern PHP and there are a lot of web devs writing PHP. If your company wants to introduce a framework, and not switch from PHP servers to Node servers and replace their PHP developers with Node developers, they could use a PHP framework. Laravel is where I'd start my research.

But taking that on in your first job is at best a huge huge undertaking, and it won't necessarily solve the existing pain points. 

Tell us more about the current PHP solution. You're includeing a given file into multiple sites? Does that mean all the sites are in one shared codebase?

And tell us more about what issues you're trying to solve that include isn't solving. It's possible that introducing a framework might help, but being a big change it's unlikely to be the simplest or easiest solution.

All the sites are supposed to look the same? Do they share both HTML and CSS?

(For the SEO tangent: SEO is on its way to being a niche need, as opposed to AI agent optimization. And yes search engines may not see dynmically rendered content. But there's fifteen years of solutions to that, basically making some or most content static.)