Efficiently reusing (poorly designed) JSON template for additional sites? - css

Question

My supervisor just handed me a pile of JSON files from a freelancer which we are going to use to make multiple (similar) websites. Lucky me, I'll get to be the one updating the content and css for the different versions.
This is my first time working with JSON, so while I can't be sure that this is a poorly designed template, the fact that the css is very messy (in order to change the color of buttons throughout the site from yellow to orange, at least 15 different classes need to be adjusted, which seems to me to defeat the whole purpose of css...) doesn't give me hope.
I've brute-forced my way through the first two different sites, but since it looks like we'll be doing a lot more of them, I'm looking for ways to streamline the process (in particular making sure to change the content in all the places the content needs changing, which is a lot of files, with different content for different versions).
I'm personally old-school enough to like awk (well, that, and it's what I'm most used to programming in), so my backup plan is to just set up an awk/batch script or two which will take in a "these are the bits of info that go in these specific places" file and update all the relevant files. However, I'm sure there's a better way to do this, which is why I'm turning to y'all.
Is there anything that already exists for streamlining processes like these? Or a coding system/language that's well-suited to this project? A GUI which I can connect to bits of text that need changing?
Ideally, I'd like to set up something that even a monkey (or a non-caffeinated me) could use as often as needed. I'm already going to have to dive into the source code to clean it up (because, gasp, we might need to be able to have more than 5 people on the "our team" page, for example - without bad css/html workarounds), so making other tweaks that'll help with the content update process can happen en route.

Answer 1

I have recently used underscore to render templates from JSON. this is a front end tool, but you could automate it with some backend tools (a simple cURL or file_get_content in php will do).
Here is a link to a tutorial
your template will be a JavaScript template in your html file:
<div id="rendered"></div>
<script type="text/template" class="template">
<%- rc.listTitle %>
</script>
and in your JavaScript code you load:
<script type="text/javascript">
// When rending an underscore template, we want top-level
// variables to be referenced as part of an object. For
// technical reasons (scope-chain search), this speeds up
// rendering; however, more importantly, this also allows our
// templates to look / feel more like our server-side
// templates that use the rc (Request Context / Colletion) in
// order to render their markup.
_.templateSettings.variable = "rc";
// Grab the HTML out of our template tag and pre-compile it.
var template = _.template(
$( "script.template" ).html()
);
// Define our render data (to be put into the "rc" variable).
var templateData = {
listTitle: "Olympic Volleyball Players",
};
// Render the underscore template and inject it after the div rendered
// in our current DOM.
$( "#rendered" ).after(
template( templateData )
);
</script>