Can I export an entire Wordpress site to a static site for permanent archiving?

July 9, 2007 10:40 AM

I'm running an online symposium using Wordpress, & it is a fixed-term six-week event. After that, I'd like to be able to keep a permanent "snapshot" archive of the site for burning and distributing on CD (for offline reading & passing out at conferences, where there is likely to be no net connection).

So far I've looked at WP-Offline, but this seems like it's a one-page-at-a-time archive. I could export the DB and run it on a php/sql laptop for conference display, but that's not really a long-term solution.

Any thoughts about how I might be able to create a permanent, self-contained site?

posted by media_itoku to computers & internet (4 comments total)

You could use or write a simple php script that would take every blog entry index.php?p=[variable] and save the output as [variable].html - that way you could just download all the html files and pop them onto a CD.
posted by Zephyrial at 11:19 AM on July 9, 2007

You might be able to export an RSS feed of the entire blog (and any comments). I did something similar when I moved from one hosted platform to another. Once you've got the XML, you should be able to slice it and dice it any way you wanted.
posted by jquinby at 11:22 AM on July 9, 2007

Use wget to mirror the site. Clicky.

Here's a how to.
posted by doublesix at 12:07 PM on July 9, 2007

I agree with "use wget", but you should pay a little extra attention during the setup of Wordpress to make this easy. Make sure your URLs are of the "/blog/content/2007/03/article-name" format (or similar), rather than the "index.php?p=..." variety. Then, enable the option in the Wordpress config file to append ".html" to the end of your URLs.

That way, when you get your wget mirror of the site, it should work without having to modify any of the links, and the layout of the mirror will still match the layout of the "live" site.
posted by CrayDrygu at 12:29 PM on July 9, 2007 [1 favorite]