How to serve index.html with certain elements to certain users?

Question

I am wanting to serve various users a index.html page however certain users can only see certain elements such as buttons for example. I'm using the Express framework, I know you can "register" views then feed the allow / deny certain web pages to a user but I want to allow / deny certain elements for a webpage when the login. Was wondering if anyone has experience in this?

Answer 1

This is a relatively common use case. Logged in users generally show some sort of account link, while logged out users generally show a login button, or perhaps a signup button.

I have never used express, but its documentation suggests using jade templating engine which should support conditionals.

http://expressjs.com/guide/using-template-engines.html

With jade, you could render an index.html using a context containing a user, and render the specific template elements conditionally:

http://jade-lang.com/reference/conditionals/

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Another approach is rendering completely separate index.html files based on your user classes.

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tempalte inheritance is another powerful tool to render similar templates to different users. Generally it is used to contain your base template information, ie site-wide header, footer, body container

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and keep in mind, conditionally showing links and elements and buttons on a page isn't enough to protect your site, if a user shouldn't access a specific endpoint then authentication/authorization needs to be enforced on the server side