Maintaining multiple similar repos - best practice

[do-me]

Hi everyone,

I'd like to ask some general advice here but I guess it has the potential to turn into a longer opiniated discussion.

Situation

Our company has a product suite of 5 products. Each product has it's own mkdocs-material wiki. The general structure of the wikis (e.g. customized landing page & icons), the used plugins, settings etc. is identical for each wiki but there is different content.

Problem

Maintaining is on the edge of becoming a pain as I need to update the source code of all wikis individually.

Question

What are the options for simplifying this workflow?

Thoughts

I have a couple of solution ideas:

0. (Keep it as is until it becomes an actual overhead)
1. Using git submodule. So basically putting everything the wikis have in common in one submodule. Did anyone ever try with mkdocs-material?
2. Using some kind of third-party app. I imagine it to work like this: reference all repos and all files to be updated in the repos. Tell the app where to insert/update/delete a line and push the changes. Only the where part seems to be difficult if the config files have a slightly different structure. I'd prefer a CLI but maybe someone developed a GUI for this before? Anyway, this approach seems to have the potential to mess up all repos in the blink of an eye.

[squidfunk]

#4226 (comment) explains how to package a preconfigured version of Material for MkDocs. This will work if your sites are (almost) the same. If you deviate, it might be a better idea to create a plugin or hook which preconfigures the site according to your needs.