Instructions for Use and Material Safety Datasheet Library and Bespoke WordPress Plugin
One of the major projects I recently tackled was the inclusion of an extensive library of Instructions for Use, and Material Safety Datasheets into my employer’s website. The idea was to get the documents on the website, and serve them in such a way that it was easy for customers to grab the files, and have the files harmonised with the up to date versions on the company’s QA platform. Having the documents online would not only offer convenience to our customers and end users, but also free up time for staff tasked with fielding requests for these documents. The successful implementation of this library represented a big win.
Of course there are many paid for wordpress plugins which may have been a solution to this particular problem of serving assorted document types to an end user, but the few initial plugin candidates I researched didn’t quite tick the boxes in terms of how the documents were displayed, but also tended to have a costly subscription to use them.
With the company’s QA platform being a walled off entity to maintain integrity and security, I had to devise a way of collating and managing the files so that they could be easily cross-referenced with the QA platform once uploaded to the website.
To facilitate this, not only did I need to tidy up the formatting of a myriad of files and work through an alternative approach in file generation and naming convention with the R&D team, I also needed to vibe-code python scripts to scrape data from the files and to bulk edit them.
To display the documents on site, I developed a bespoke wordpress plugin which would display the files in a convenient and attractive way. Take a look again at the top image above – the effect of the plugin is to display a custom tab (can be seen near the bottom of the webpage screen grab) which displays links to the available documentation associated with a particular product. Not only did the plugin facilitate the serving of the IFU and MSDS files as per the original remit, I also figured this plugin could also be used to serve product flyers and other documents – up to four different types. The plugin also has some back-end administration functions including the ability to display thumbnails and filenames of the uploaded files to provide visual feedback to the website admin, customisable icons and colours to help with usability for the end user, and the also the ability to rename the assorted document types which could be associated with a product – new legislation may dictate that the IFU format is replaced by some other type of document, just as Technical Data Sheets were replaced with Instructions for Use documents.
This was a fantastic project which further developed my knowledge of AI agents such as ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Manus, showed me their limitations (they can be painfully frustrating and dare I say it, a bit flaky), but also helped me cut my teeth with Python scripts and VSCode. I should reiterate that I’m not a coder!!!.