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turtle
Lord of the Rant.
Formerly turtle2472
 
Join Date: Mar 2005
Location: Upstate South Carolina
 
2022-01-21, 21:57

I'm needing a tool/plugin that will take a working WP site and spit it out as static HTML. I did it once with my old turtle blog but don't recall how I did that given it was more than 6 years ago. I'm sure things have changed today. While I'm going to go consult the oracle, I'm wondering if anyone has any experience or knowledge about this before I am forced to try random things?

Louis L'Amour, “To make democracy work, we must be a nation of participants, not simply observers. One who does not vote has no right to complain.”
Visit our archived Minecraft world! | Maybe someday I'll proof read, until then deal with it.
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drewprops
Space Pirate
 
Join Date: May 2004
Location: Atlanta
 
2022-01-22, 00:45

I think there are plugins that cook your dynamic site down into static snapshot. You may even be able to export that into a flat site, maybe??


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turtle
Lord of the Rant.
Formerly turtle2472
 
Join Date: Mar 2005
Location: Upstate South Carolina
 
2022-01-22, 13:28

Simply Static is what I ended up finding and using. It did require me to upgrade the php on my server to 7.4 in order to use it, but it worked well.

There are a bunch of paid versions of plugins for this out there, I just wanted to do a basic export for archiving reasons. I'm really not interested in maintaining the dependancies for WP at this point in my life. Static is safer and simpler. Maybe I'll build a local WP site and just export it to the web rather than keep an active WP site.

Louis L'Amour, “To make democracy work, we must be a nation of participants, not simply observers. One who does not vote has no right to complain.”
Visit our archived Minecraft world! | Maybe someday I'll proof read, until then deal with it.
  quote
Brad
Selfish Heathen
 
Join Date: May 2004
Location: Zone of Pain
 
2022-01-23, 01:59

Thanks for sharing your findings, T. I also still have one old WordPress site sitting off to the side that I've been meaning to something like this with too, but haven't touched in years except to hit the software upgrade button. Maybe you just gave me motivation to look into it again.

Since you've gone through the motions, how did Simple Static work in terms of outputting content? Did you have it dump a tar/zip file? Or did you give it credentials to upload files directly to a server somewhere? Did you have any other custom themes or plugins that it had to cope with, or did you have a pretty stock WP setup?

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turtle
Lord of the Rant.
Formerly turtle2472
 
Join Date: Mar 2005
Location: Upstate South Carolina
 
2022-01-23, 20:20

Wow, 6 years later and it is still the same product I used last time.

Guess I could have used search.

There is a very basic setup where you can set the output to be a relative path or a full FQDN. This is handy with WP so you can build the site with an IP address in the URL instead of an FQDN. Then when you publish the site it will be published with the new FQDN. Relative is nice if you want to be able to move it around to something like a from a primary domain to a subdomain. I went relative for this one so I can relocate it down the road easier.

The result is a single ip file. It can be saved to the server the site is hosting or made available to download. Depending on size would determine which option to choose. While large zips can be downloaded through the browser, it would be better to move from the server with CLI options.

The theme for this site was mildly custom, but nothing outrageous. Plugins were minimal and mostly security focused. It handled them like a champ and the results are a static site that is based on relative paths. It did just what I wanted it to do.

The one are I had to do things with manually were linked sites from the side bar. This particular blog had links to previous iWeb sites that were hosted with it. Simply Static did not navigate those and render them. It kept the external link and properly links that, but didn't save the files. I had to manually copy those over to the proper URL for them to work right.

I didn't have to move manually the images and such posted with the site. Everything in the "uploads" folder came with the zip and didn't require any manual at all.

Louis L'Amour, “To make democracy work, we must be a nation of participants, not simply observers. One who does not vote has no right to complain.”
Visit our archived Minecraft world! | Maybe someday I'll proof read, until then deal with it.
  quote
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