Is there a tool for managing redundant pages across a website?

Question

I am in charge of constructing a website with a '2-dimensional' site map, as explained later.

I am looking for (preferably a Wordpress plugin, as the site is built in Wordpress already) that would make managing thousands of pages a lot easier.

To explain further, let me iterate my situation. I am building a website for a construction company, and they have several key cities and several key services. Now, they want a parent page for each service, and another unique page for the child sub-service, and finaly, a grandchild page for the city they are performing the service in.

For example, if they were doing Concrete Construction in Los Angeles, the URL would look like:

/concrete/construction/los-angeles

The content on /los-angeles would be the same as on /malibu, or /burbank.

However, there would be a different set of content for /concrete/design/los-angeles, but the entire page content (sans a few variables with city names) would be the same.

Is there a way to manage or automate 'matrixing' this information on the site? I am looking for a tool that would allow me to easily add a 'city' with the same content across all grandchildren, per the child's content requirements. All of the grandchildren pages will have redundant content across them.

Should something like this not exist, how difficult would it be to create, as a freelance side project? I need a tool like this, because I am approaching about ~500 cities and 50 services (Concrete Construction, Concrete Design, Concrete Engineering, etc)

Answer 1

The way I would go about this is using a Templating Engine to you could create the pages dynamically and cache them or just create static pages from a set of inputs and output and let your web server or WordPress cache them with a plugin, there are robust templating solutions in just about every language available. Python, Perl, Ruby would probably be the easiest to set up and manage. Pick a language and Google for that language and templating and you should find lots of solutions and pick one you are comfortable with.

Answer 2

Make a php function that will get the page URL and split it on "/". Based on the last part, the function should return the name of the city. Then use the call to this php function on your pages. Since you are using wordpress, you will already have php

Answer 3

A CMS system that supports taxonomy and tagging.

For instance, Drupal has Taxonony and together with some Taxonomy modules and Views, you can have virtually hundreds of combinations of URLs that pass arguments to the View and return content. That's just one example though. A lot of CMS can facilitate this need. Not sure about Wordpress though, as Posts are not really Pages, unless you have created all the content as Pages.

You could take it a step further too and implement Tokens into content and/or String Overrides to replace key words with dynamic values.