Offering different content to different clients

Question

In an Intranet I have two groups of clients, each well known by their IP address. I want to present Joomla module A for clients from both groups, module B only for the clients of group 1 and module C only for clients of group 2.
When the clients are power on they shall go to the front page without human interaction. So using different logins would only work if I can login automatically with different accounts from different clients.

One idea would be to use a .htaccess-RewriteCond based on the IP and deliver special created CSS-files (for each group, using display: none; to remove the unwanted content.

But it would be much nicer to use somehow the internals of Joomla. Is there a way to create a URL that logs me into the Joomla system, or can you think of an other way to tell Joomla which content has to be displayed to this specific client just by the URL (that can be altered by the .htaccess mod.rewrite)?

Answer 1

One of the most powerful module managers for Joomla is MetaMod. I have been using it for ages and in any imaginable scenario.

It has powerfull set of criterias: by date, time, recurring time, GeoIP (country of viewer), browser type and language, user name, group, page within other component (e.g. Virtuemart, K2), on-page text, article keywords, by article, section/category, domain, referrer… and at the end, even more powerfull PHP Rules, of which there are numeros examples a.k.a. PHP Recipes.

One of these recipes is Control modules by IP address, which might be what you are looking for.

For the Second Part of your Question, there is great little plugin IP Login from NoNumber, which allows you to log into your Joomla frontend and/or administrator side automatically by IP address.

You can simply set up IP address and a secret URL key in user's profile in the administrator. The URL key needs to be put in the url as a 'query' variable, like: http://www.yourdomain.com?mxx8hrv4

If the URL already contains a ?, you can prepend the key with an &, like: http://www.yourdomain.com/administrator/index.php?option=com_content&mxx8hrv4

Hope this helps.

Answer 2

I have achieve great result usging the nonumbers extensions like advanced module manager and advanced template manager.

Links: https://www.nonumber.nl/extensions/advancedmodulemanager#free-vs-pro https://www.nonumber.nl/extensions/advancedtemplatemanager#free-vs-pro

These two extensions extend the possibilities to assgin templates and modules on a number of extra criteria, including browser, ips, urls, languages, custom php and more. I suggest them for use cases like the one you describe.