readme.md

WordPress Static HTML Output

Allows you to leverage WordPress as a great CMS, but benefit from the speed, security and portability that a static website provides.

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The lead developer of this plugin, Leon Stafford, is also available for custom web development work. Shoot him an email to see if he can solve your problems: [email protected].

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Features

• generates a standalone, static html copy of your whole WordPress website
• auto-deploy to local folder, FTP, Dropbox, S3, GitHub Pages, Netlify or BunnyCDN
• scheduled exports via WP-Crontrol of by hitting the custom hook
• one site to unlimited export targets
• specify extra files to include in the output (ie, dynamically loaded assets)
• desktop notifications alert you to when exports are complete
• multi-language support (English/Japanese currently)

Use cases

• Securing a website from malicious attacks/malware
• Fastest hosting options for static websites
• Free hosting via GitHub, GitLab, BitBucket, etc.
• Website archival
• Cheap, fast and secure hosting for a digital agency

Demo site

You can see a working example here of a vanilla WordPress install with some sample posts. It is hosted on GitHub Pages, but could just as easily be hosted on Dropbox, BitBucket, GitLab, S3, Netlify, BunnyCDN, your own server or anywhere else you can host HTML files. It is prone to breakage as I use it when testing development versions of the plugin.

Got a site you've used the plugin to export and would like to share it here as a case study? Would love to hear from you!

TODO: move the demo theme into this repo, along with demonstrations of WP Hide and other useful plugins for WP static sites.

Scheduling exports via CRON/WP-CRON, etc

Using the WP Crontrol plugin, you can add this hook to a schedule to trigger an export: wp_static_html_output_server_side_export_hook. This will run your export using the settings you've saved via the GUI. Via this method, you can schedule your exports to happen daily or if you're after an on-post publish kind of behaviour, you could set this to every few minutes.

Roadmap

A Waffle.io project board shows what is upcoming and being worked on. You can filter the board by bugs, new features, enhancements, etc.

other things in the works

• selectively export only changed pages since last output
• more export targets (GitLab, BitBucket and more)
• auto trigger an export on a post/page publish action
• WP CLI integration
• submission of bug report from within plugin
• backwards compatibility with older php and wordpress versions (degrade gracefully) (delayed until further release)

Theme & Plugin compatibility

Whilst it would be a challenge to test with every possible combination of plugins and themes, WP Static HTML Output Plugin has been tested with those in the following table and any notes are included. If you would like to see a fix to make it compatible with a certain theme or plugin, contact me.

Theme/plugin name

Known to work well Issues Notes Elementor page builder

GeneratePress

Avada Theme

Slider Revolution

see #2

Contact Form Maker

see #13

Development

Latest development build status:

This repo contains the latest code, which you can clone/download to get the bleeding edge, else install via the official WordPress Plugin page

If you'd like to contribute, please follow the usual GitHub procedures (create an Issue, fork repo, submit PR). If you're unsure about any of that, contact me and I'll be happy to help.

Libraries

Composer version of plugins will not work within the plugin for most users, so we convert and require/include them.

Docker quickstart

To quickly try out the plugin, without affecting your other WordPress installations:

• install Docker
• `./provisioning/destroy_and_rebuild.sh # view contents of this file to see how it builds
• `./provisioning/get_webserver_ip.sh # outputs the IP address of the WordPress container
• open IP in browser and you have a clean WP install, including the plugin (l/p: admin/admin)

Optional use case - for me, I sometimes need to do development on a remote EC2 instance (to overcome terrible internet speeds where I am). In this instance, I need to set the site URL to the public DNS or assigned domain name of my EC2 instance. You can copy the ./provisioning/.env-vars-SAMPLE file to ./provisioning/.env-vars and set the WPSTATICURL variable within to your publicly accessible URL on port 8091.

Demo website content

Included in the ./demo_site_content/ dir, are the posts used for the demo sites for this plugin, including guides on functionality.

To capture content from the development instance, run ./provisioning/backup_demo_content.sh

There is a great Dockerized FTP server which I've found useful in development. I may extend this to also serve the hosted files for more complete test capabilities. So long as you can install Docker, this is a much less painful way to get a local FTP server and users setup than what I've experienced before.

Localisation / translations

Uses the https://github.com/cedaro/grunt-wp-i18n npm module and the Gruntfile.js in the project root. npm i -g grunt then grunt to scan plugin source and generate a new languages/static-html-output-plugin.pot file.

A packages.json file and .nvmrc exist to help show the dependencies required to get the grunt task working.

Our official translation page on wordpress.org.

Debugging

Connect to the container running the Apache instance.

sudo docker ps To find the running container.

sudo docker exec -it {CONTAINER_ID} bash

Tail the PHP access/error logs as such:

docker logs -f plugindevwp

To display only errors and hide the access log, you can pipe stdout to /dev/null:

docker logs -f plugindevwp >/dev/null

To follow only the access log, you can pipe stderr to /dev/null:

docker logs -f your_php_apache_container 2>/dev/null

Debugging cURL requests

Set the CURLOPT_VERBOSE to true, with an example in the S3 library.

Support

Please raise an issue here on GitHub or on the plugin's support forum.

Contact

Email me, Leon Stafford, at [email protected]

Donations

Has this plugin helped you save some money on web hosting or otherwise helped you out? Please consider donating via PayPal to help me help others.